Sacred 2: Fallen Angel Review
The combat in Sacred 2 is as hack and slash as it can possibly get. Most enemies can be slaughtered with a single combat art or even a single blow from your weapon. Usually a bunch of enemies have a boss type with them, who is slightly harder to kill and drops better loot. If you are a decent player you will quickly figure out how to lure the right amount of enemies and use area of effect skills on them, so as to dispose of them even faster. Each area usually has its own kind of creatures as well. Some places are inhabited by humans, elfs or even orcs, which all have their own fighting styles. Besides the usual baddy’s you’ll encounter a few bosses during the campaign. These bosses are so big, they’ll fill up the bigger part of your screen. Besides being big they are also very powerful and take some time to kill. It’s really too bad some of the bosses are stuck in some weird kind of scripted routine, or they would be an even bigger challenge to kill. They drop loads of loot and good loot at that, whether in singleplayer or online, they sure are worth the trouble of killing. Sometimes the special power you get from the god you choose can make the fight a little easier. One of the special powers, for example, spawns a badass demon who will wreak havoc among your enemies. Beware though, after some time you will lose control over your demon, and chances are he will turn on you and try to rip you to shreds.
Gameplay-wise Sacred 2 is most definitely up to snuff, as it handles being an RPG just fine, expanding on the succesfull formula from Sacred. With that formula, which basically was a Diablo clone, it’s very hard to go wrong. But there are more places where a game or its developers can go wrong. With Sacred 2 there isn’t much to complain about, were it not for the often very apparent bugs that can really take the joy out of playing. I’ve had quite a few unexplainable crashes and slowdowns. The devs released a hotfix that actually made things worse for many players. Luckily enough, they responded with another hotfix quite fast, fixing the issue. But even after the latest patches, my mount would often still not come to me when I called for it. A new patch has just been released, so the game can count on ongoing support from its developers. Performance-wise, Sacred 2 is most definitely humming along with other top-down RPG’s just fine. The environments look very much alive and the character models are very detailed. Soundwise my only complaint would be the voice-overs, which sometimes managed to irritate me beyond belief. Especially female characters can make some kind of battle cry – or that’s at least what it’s supposed to be – that can make you wish you were born deaf. The game also uses physX from Nvidia, which can be GPU accelerated. It is said that disabling GPU acceleration of the physX can improve the frame rates for lower-end videocards. The physics aren’t as groundbreaking and gameplay altering as we would like to see though, and the most obvious physics are the ragdoll effects, a nice gimmick, but not really important. Either way, Sacred 2 will run at lower settings on laptops with HD3470 mobile GPUs! Something stronger, like a 9800gtx or HD4850 and you’re good to go at resolutions of 1680*1050 with max settings.
Personally, I was expecting a little more from Sacred 2, and I don’t think it will be quite the hit the original Sacred was. Fact is, publishers have thrown a dozen good games at us in less than 2 months, and I’m not sure if gamers are going to manage to squeeze Sacred 2 in there, even if a decent RPG is hard to find nowadays. Right now I would recommend the game, especially since it has had some time to mature (it has been released in Europe for roughly 2 months now) losing quite a few of its game-breaking bugs. If you can’t wait for those highly anticipated titles like Dragon Age: Origins, or Diablo III; then Sacred 2: Fallen Angel might just be the fix you need to keep you going a little while longer. Once finished with the singleplayer it’s easy enough to find plenty of action online, so combined with the huge map, Sacred 2 has a lot of replay value. The DRM (Digital Rights Management) that comes with Sacred 2 is also pretty soft; it can be installed on 2 PC’s simultaneously, requires no DVD to play, and if you want to install it on another PC all you have to do is revoke your activation by uninstalling the game while connected to the internet. So in the end, it gets Marc’s ABT approval stamp! Go buy it, and enjoy yourself.
Marc Rademaker
