Sacred 2: Fallen Angel Review
I’m going to use a Mage as an example, because it’s the easiest to explain. Each character has three different classes of combat-arts. The Mage has a fire-based class, a water-based class and an-arcane based class. Each class then has five different combat-arts, which can be made more powerful with each subsequent rune you use. Increasing a combat-arts strength by adding another rune has its drawbacks though. The “cool-down” time of the upgraded skill will increase, and during the cool-down time all 5 combat-arts from that class cannot be used. So if you use a meteor shower and the cool-down time is 10 seconds, for the next 10 seconds you cannot throw a fireball either. This is where combos come in handy, because by using combos you can circumvent those nasty cool-down periods. And combos of course look cool when you dish out crazy amounts of damage, leaving behind a path of destruction.
Runes can be found as loot and by simply right clicking them you will memorize them for life, thus increasing the strength of a combat-art. When you level up you also gain skill points; these can be used to increase your proficiency in the use of certain combat-arts or weapons. You can only get ten skills though, so you have to choose them carefully! Through skills you can significantly lower the cool-down times of your combat-arts and increase their strength at the same time. If you pour enough skillpoints into a combat-art related skill you also gain upgrade points. The meteor storm you’re looking at, for example, can be made stronger by adding more meteors or by making the meteor shower last longer. This adds another interesting layer of depth to the whole customization level of your character. Picking the right skills might look easy at first sight, but there are certain ‘builds’ that will really kick the crap out of some random-made character. All in all, there are plenty of options to customize and improve your character – enough to keep you interested and wanting to level up more. I haven’t even mentioned the loot system, which works pretty much the same as in the original Sacred. There are varying colors, from blue, to gold to green; the latter being set-items which are really strong once you have multiple items of one set. The fact that you can sell anything that you have in your inventory without visiting a trader comes in handy when you are in the middle of nowhere. In the singleplayer campaign gold is pretty useless though, I only used it to buy potions and mounts, and to enchant a weapon once in a while.
During all of the fighting and moving from one quest to another, you will come across a lot of different landscapes – from traditional forests, to deserts and lush rainforests. The map is very big, and even after 25 hours of gameplay I haven’t even seen 25% of it. Sure, a lot of the map holds nothing of interest, but still, there are plenty of places to explore, including dungeons that can be quite large. To minimize traveling times there are portals, and to cover shorter distances there are mounts you can use. At first every character will have to make do with a horse, but later on you will come across an island where special creatures are trained to be mounts. Each class has its own special mount – from little flying dragons, to saber-toothed tigers and hellhounds. One of the more distinctly different classes, the Temple Guardian, has a mechanized mount. With your mount you can also run past enemies if you’re not in the mood for fighting. Good thing you can, because nearly every inch of the map is covered with enemies, making normal progress pretty slow. Whether you choose the good or the evil campaign doesn’t matter much, because the evil campaign isn’t vastly different from the good campaign. The main bosses are the same, only some quests are different, as is the outcome of the whole story of course.
