Sacred 2: Fallen Angel

About time the PS3 got a decent RPG. And for the fans of Champions of Norrath on the PS2...this is a must buy. Its sort of like the Oblivion of hack and slash RPGs...

So, here's a little list of the things I love about it!
- This map is hhuuggee...it just goes on and on and on and on
- Loads of quests and I mean loads! The side-quests are not plentiful but are fun...varied tasks: SOme invovle just talking, some requrie you to escort, kill monsters, explore the map collecting things, you get the gist.
- The enviroments in this game are beautiful, so varied, so well created. There's lots of caves, caverens, dungeons and basements to venture into. With weather effects, day and night cycles its a pleasure just to explore.
- Lots of different mounts to buy (including horses!) that you can use to attack, jump over small walls etc as well as class specific mounts. Each mount improves yor character in diferent ways
- Basically, you create the the controls. You have four action buttons (X, Square, circle, triangle) you decide what each one does. So, for example, equip a sword onto X, a bow onto Tri...and everytime you press X, your character attacks with a sword, when you press Tri he attacks with his bow. As well as that! by holding down R2 or L2 you get eight more slots so in total, 3x4 slots = 12 slots to equip weapons and magics. Potions are assigned to the D-pad...so you got 4 slots there to play around with tooooooo.
- The devlopers seriously had some fun making this game. There's lots of humour, such as a jokes on gravestones (which you can read), there's even a quest which lets you watch a cutscene of a metal music band playing their songs...great! And for a quest you have to gather all of the Sacred 2 deelopers and give them a kick up the back side so that'll get onto working on Sacred 3 - a great and fun quest where you can vitually snoop around the Sacred 2 Headquarters!!!!
- Someone else wants to play with you? All they have to do is turn on a controller and press start...and they're in, they want to leave, just the opposite basically. So easy to get friends to play with you...the online modes great too...up to 4 players. Each player can go their seperate way/s, play a campaign, free play or even P2P.
- Customize your own spells! Do you want your fire bolt to have a chance at burning the enemy? Or be able to hit more people at once? Increase the range? Or reduce the time it takes to regenerate? ALL spells allow you customize them.
- Customization!!!! Wow. You can customize weapons to the max. Some weapons and armour have slots where you can add bonus's to them (such as poision damage, fire damage etc) and enhance them. In the end, you have loads of customization of weapons and armour!!!
- Trophies. For the games I've got this has the MOST TROPHIES. Granted there are some very hard trophies but they're all achievable and there's plenty for the trophy hunter in ya...or just for something to aim for!

Alais, its not all good news for this game, I'll tell you why:
- I brought this game because people said you can do four player LAN (2 people on 2 PS3s)...but you can't. Meh (but if you can 4 PS3s you can do 4 player LAN
- Limited choice of characters and hardly any customization of them.
- What I felt was the 'point' of RPGs, but the makers managed to suck the fun out of picking up new weapons and armour. They're presented in a list format altough you get a picture, its not as fun as in say Champions, Balders gate, Dungeon Seige and even the PC version of the Sacred 2
- The tutorial is poor and for things like getting new spells and encharting weapons you are left in the dark. A step by step guide would make this game a lot easier to master.
- YOU CAN'T STOP LITERALLY!: Because you can't pause it. Posibliy one of the most annoying things about this game, you can't pause it - probabaly because they wanted it mainly as a online only title...even though...a pause function would be great...

In short, if you're a fan of RPGS partically Champions, you'll find it a great investment. The game is almost endless and with two different campaigns it will keep you occupied for a very very VERY long time....

Having read a lot of positive reviews about this game I thought I'd give it a go but found it to be extremely dissapointing. While there is nothing technically wrong with the game it just seems to have no charm to it. This game could take hours and hours to complete, but there was not enough to compel me to want to.

Firstly the good points about the game is that it looks very nice. The Diablo style graphics and smoothly scrolling game world are extremely detailed and there are a good mix of environments to explore. The six main characters all look good, although there is the usual fantasy sexism ( a female warrior fighting in 6" heels does look a little silly ). Oddly one of the most likeable parts of this game is the soundtrack which varies according to which character you play and whether you are in combat or not - there are some really good electric guitar tracks when you are fighting.

The games plot though is a big let down as there is nothing about it to grip you or alter the fact that its completely irrelevant. 99.9% Of the game involves wandering around killing everything in sight, which makes it very difficult to introduce a plot that makes any difference to the player. Depending on the class you play you start with a different prelude, and have different end goals, but the main story remains pretty much the same. There is some background detail to the world but not much, it is not a believeable environment in any way.

The vast majority of this game involves combat, which is extremely repetitive and dull. Wherever you go outside of town you get attacked over and over again. Hundreds and hundreds of wild animals, monsters, bandits and other adversaries throw themselves at you and die in droves. By the time you have finished the game I would imagine the death toll would rival World War II. Obviously this sort of consistent arcade action is not meant to be taken too seriously but its just boring. Very rarely are you ever challenged by what you are fighting and there are virtually no tactics involved beyond occasionally using a special ability to kill things quicker.

Your reward for all this endless button bashing is an equally limitless supply of magical treasure. This is one of those games where you are constantly upgrading and replacing magic items you find. There are so many magic items in this game they all appear quite mundane and its just irritating having to constantly review them to make sure you are using the best items available. Which items you find is pretty much down to luck though, and being lucky enough to find a powerful magic item for your class can make you ten times more powerful than you were before, greatly disrupting game balance. Eventually though even the really rare sword you found at level 10 is next to useless at level 15, so you trade it in or chuck it away like it was nothing.

As is traditional your penchant for mass murder is rewarded with experience points and levels which equate to new special powers and skills. To give you some idea of the size of this game I understand that you can reach level 200 in Sacred ! Each level you get skill points to spend on improving your abilities but these are extremely over complicated. If you don't want to waste points improving the wrong skills you need to look at one of the websites supporting the game, otherwise you can find the game becoming overly difficult because you did not understand how all the skills work. In the end though they make little difference to the game play. It does not take long to gain access to all your characters special attacks, and apart from looking impressive they still boil down to being a slightly faster way to kill your enemies.

In between wandering the world and killing every living thing there are numerous side quests. These are generally fetch and carry tasks that quickly become repetitive and have you running back and forth over the same area again and again. This is doubly irritating as the monsters continously respawn, meaning for example that in order to fetch some worms for the boy fishing by the pond you have to fight your way through over a hundred monsters on your way there and back. How any of the peasants in this world survive a trip down the shops is beyond me !

This game does include multiplayer options and I can imagine that this is probably the best way to get any enjoyment from the game. Playing Sacred 2 with friends will afford you god knows how many hours of mindless entertainment if you just want some simple undemanding game play.

Unfortunately though this game is so simple, dull and uninspiring I found nothing to encourage me to play to the end. There is no story of interest, no meaningful character development, the combat is not exciting in the least, and the treasures you find are mass produced and uninteresting. I really would not reccomend this game to anyone unless you really have nothing better to do with your time than wear down your controller mindlessly depopulating an unrealistic fantasy world. Believe me there are much better fantasy RPG's out there.

I really like this kind of game and this is a very well-done example - like an update of Diablo or Baldur's Gate. Nicer graphics and better characters and development.

I like the quests - but am not sure of my overall linear direction - which may or may not be a good thing ..?

There is just one thing that spoils it and is mentioned by several other reviewers - the terrible camera angle, which means you can't look ahead and see where you are going - it may not seem a big deal, but after a while I felt like I had an aching neck from trying to strain to see ahead...!!

I loved the spells although you can end up with so many of them available that you forget where they all are and what they do - but even so they are fun to use.

I don't believe I've scraped the surface yet and on dark winter evenings I may come back and play more - if my neck is not feeling too stiff!!