Sacred 2: Fallen Angel

By Chris Cesarano

To be absolutely honest, the only reason Sacred 2 was on my radar was because Blind Guardian wrote a song for the game. This was awesome news and I felt I should somehow support the game as a result. Of course, when it was released I was no longer sure it was worth my money.

Finally I just grabbed it from GameFly to give a whirl, and I must say I’m a bit pleased and disappointed. Character selection was piercingly demoralizing as the atrocious voice actors detailed the backgrounds of each character class. In the end my choice wasn’t based on the sort of character I wanted to play but instead on which one was the least irritating to listen to. As it turns out, the best performance was for the monotone robot without emotions. I’m just going to let the implications of that sink in for a moment.

The opening cinematic was a bit more enriching, particularly since it made use of Blind Guardian’s song effectively. I felt as if I might be in store for a decently epic story. Instead, a few guys dug my robotic shell from an ancient ruin. Suddenly I’m wandering about with nothing but a compass on screen to tell me where to go. It turns out this game has the same sort of importance on story as the Elder Scrolls series, which I’ll get to in a later entry. Still, I figured I’d play the game until I could exchange it for another title coming out and proceeded onward.

What I stumbled upon was some kind of cross between Oblivion, Dragon Age and Diablo. The primary motivation is to perform side quests, level up, loot enemies and equip better weapons and armor. Unlike a veritable loot-filled holiday such as Too Human, however, you aren’t swapping equipment every five or ten minutes. You just end up selling most of it and storing the cash until you’re a walking gold mine.

As stated there is a primary quest present as well as a character-specific quest for each class, but there seems to be little drive to progress in either one. Even if you begin to ignore the side quests (as I had done after hour ten) there seems to be little of real importance going on. Nothing to just hook you right in and think “wow, I care about the fate of this world and the characters within”. It may as well be an online multiplayer RPG with all of the side quests.

In fact, I found that’s the most preferable way to play the game. Start a new game with some friends and just go out adventuring together. Experience comes in greater supply, you can split up and complete multiple quests at the same time or just make quick work of a dungeon’s inhabitants together. All of a sudden MMORPG’s make sense to me. Or at least, they would if I weren’t still playing with just the people I like and not having to pay monthly for it.

The only hang-up (on the Xbox 360 at least) was the netcode. If you weren’t hosting the game you were probably experiencing terrible lag. It may not occur as soon as the game begins, and you may even run smooth as silk for about half an hour. After that the frame rate drops and the battlefield becomes a complete mess. This doesn’t seem to be a consistent problem for everyone that plays, but it is widespread enough to be an obvious issue. Since no patch has been released in all the time the game has been out and the original team was disbanded, it can be assumed no fix will be on its way. So while the online is definitely the most fun, it is also the most flawed aspect of Sacred 2.

As for saying the game was part Dragon Age, that’s isolated strictly to the combat and primarily how it was ported onto the Xbox 360. Just as with Bioware’s title, Sacred 2 allows you to hotkey special abilities to one of the four face buttons. Holding down the R trigger will pull up a new set, and then holding the L trigger will reveal yet a third. These abilities deal enough damage and have short enough cool-down timers that you’ll usually be focusing on when best to use them rather than rapidly mashing a button to whittle down a foe’s health.

Ranged combat tends to be pretty flawed as there is no way to manually aim. The game sort of does its own auto-targeting that lacks any coherent logic. There are times you may be getting struck down by three men surrounding you but you’ll be shooting away at some jerk thirty feet away. You can try and look towards an ideal target instead, but the game will ignore these suggestions and fire away at whomever it pleases. If it just so happens to agree with you then all the better for it.

What Sacred 2 offers is hours of adventuring and gameplay in a massive world and the possibility to bring some friends along for the ride. The combat is adequate enough for this task even if some of the bosses wind up being a grind and potion chugging contest. The catch is that the voice-acting is terrible, the net code is more disorganized than a rat’s nest and the main story may as well not even exist. What it comes down to, then, is what sort of game you want to play and how much you’re willing to pay for it.

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