Sacred 2 Gold

As a disclaimer, I only played the GOG out-of-the-box version. I see people mentioning community patches and mods, which I did not install. My impressions below are solely of the unmodified Sacred 2 Gold that you get upon purchase. With that said, I dropped the game after about an hour, and even that's because I felt I should give it a chance. The first game was a decent Diablo clone, nothing special but a decent time kill if you've already played through Diablo 1 and 2 a bunch of times and are looking for something different but that also scratches the same itch. This game, however, only scratches the itch of being something to make fun of for how janky it is. Could just be an issue on my end, but I kept running into weird camera glitches (I fiddled around with the camera settings to try to offset this a bit, but nothing seemed to help get it to feel right). Apart from the camera issues, I also encountered geometry/collision issues more often than I would care to within an hour of playing. The UI and controls are also somehow even more confusing than in the first game, which was arguably the biggest problem with the original Sacred, so it didn't feel good to play, either. On one positive note, the music in the game (what little I've had the chance to listen to) was pretty good, and out of the box, the overall sound design and mixing is better than in the first game, where I had to play around with the audio settings for a few minutes to get everything to a comfortable level. Overall, I don't see myself going back to this to give it another shot. It's pretty cheap and seems to be discounted pretty frequently, so if you have a few coins to spare on it and you already went through your backlog, you can give it a try if you have a lot of patience and are a big fan of Diablo - or more specifically, inferior Diablo clones. I realize there is a community for this game that likes it a lot but I just couldn't see the appeal.

Better than Diablo 3, complete underratet. Please Play with the Sacred Community Patch forum.sacred2.de/showthread.php?t=70989 And some special information: take a look on the new project of the old sacred dev team (1&2) www.unbended.zone/en/

I EXPECTED MORE OF THE SCENCE OF SACRED

-The map is massive. From what I understand it is much larger then the Xbox versions. -There's plenty to explore and many out of the way areas and dungeons to investigate. -There is tons of loot distributed randomly. My first game I accidentally came upon heavily overpowered armor making my first play through relatively easy. -Varied characters with mounts. I play a robot jackal which has a Wheel-like vehicle (think Masters of the Universe) instead of horse. There's definitely no lack of content here but what has ruined the game is the removed game pad support which the XBox version featured - Bad move seeing as it was already there and did not have to be pulled. Carpal Tunnel Prone beware.

Why 5 stars? In my opinion, the Sacred series have still got the most motivating skill & attack mechanics of all Hack-n-Slash RPG available at the moment. Although you might occur some serious issues with the graphic engine (e.g. Physx, stutter) or unfixed bugs (getting stuck by using combos) you easily become addicted to the encouraging loot, the easter eggs (graves, concert, etc.), the atmosphere on your journey through Ancaria (think about the leaves with Physx!) Suggestion: Install Wardust's textures & music files + SweetFX preset (serious light & effects) the enemy feedback (animations seem tedious, but the voice feedback of some creeps is just gorgeous, at least for the German version!) Just remember: Ascaron didn't have time to implement more features or fix additional bugs before its bankruptcy. Therefore, I can recommend using the recent Community Patch. You can also easily turn off some of the annoying features, as the repeating remarks of your avatar or the battle music and tune the config of the game as you wish. What I find most unfortunate is, that the quest descriptions aren't read out, whereby one just tends to skip the whole and follow the marks on the map. After the big disappointment of Sacred 3, everyone should reconsider their own RPG needs. Diablo III or Sacred 2? The decision depends on your attitude. Blizzard's games have lost all their complexity nowadays and don't look particularly better then Sacred 2 does. If you prefer punchy combats over complexity you might better go with Diablo 3.