Sacred 2: Fallen Angel Review
Are you desperate for a RPG fix? Can’t wait for Dragon Age: Origins or Diablo III to hit the shelves? Then Sacred 2: Fallen Angels might just be the game you’ve been waiting for. It’s not revolutionary, but it’s most definitely quite an evolutionary step up from the original Sacred from Asacaron, which was quite successful with over 1.8 million copies sold. Being a role playing game (RPG) fan myself, I could not leave this game untouched and unreviewed; god knows my gaming addiction began with Diablo, one of the best RPGs ever made. Chances are that if you liked Sacred, you’re going to also like Sacred 2: Fallen Angel. The biggest differences between them are the vastly improved graphics and an even bigger playing map this time around.
Unlike most FPS’s you can’t just dive into an RPG, because there’s something called character creation. In Sacred 2 there are six different characters and whichever you choose will greatly affect your playing experience. One person may prefer to get up close and personal with his enemies while another likes to lean back and shoot all kinds of long range destruction at their opponents through the use of magic. To each their own, and Sacred 2 does a pretty good job at providing distinctly different classes. Only the Seraphim class has made its reappearance from Sacred; the other five characters are all brand new. Of course there are ranged characters, melee characters and the regular mage class. Each character will introduce itself, which can give you a good feel about how your character will behave in the game. For example, the Mage class is a high-elf female who is quite arrogant, which will show ingame. She will make derogatory comments about humans or people who are in need of aid. Characters will not only make comments regarding quests or NPCs, they will also comment on your level progress or the value of an item you pick up. Once you have picked your character it’s time to pick the campaign you want to play, the evil or the good campaign. Two characters, the Seraphim and the Inquisitor, are dedicated to good and evil respectively. So those two can only choose one of the campaigns. Last but not least, you have to choose a god which will grant you a special power.
Now it’s time to dive in and start playing. Each character will start at a slightly different place, but all of them will soon end up in the same town to kick off the mainquest. The singleplayer campaign basically has you run from one boss to the next one, trying to stem the tide of T-energy that is flowing into the world freely. The T-energy is responsible for all kinds of mutations and bad situations, and you have to save the day, of course. If you’re playing the evil campaign, on the other hand, you have to make sure the situation escalates so evil can triumph. For most RPG veterans there isn’t anything new, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. As in many RPGs you gain experience and find new loot to improve your character, but in Sacred 2 things work slightly different though. There are still skills you can learn, but the real skills – called combat-arts – like a fireball or a special sword move, can only be learned through the use of runes, which can be used independent of your character’s level.
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.
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
