Go out and kill (almost) everyone you see, collect all loot you can carry. Sell loot, level up, rinse, repeat. That could be the gist of this review, but there are a couple of things that makes Sacred 2 stand out in a crowd of Hack ‘n Slash RPGs.

Sacred II is a Diablo clone, that much is certain, but what else does it bring to the table besides updated graphics? Not a whole lot it would appear. You spend most of the game running around performing various quests of the “kill all rats in the cellar” type.

Another near deal-breaker is the presentation of the game by the German developer Ascaron – the intro is an all heavy-metal, 90s style FMV animation that looks really corny, but once you get past it you’ll realize that the entire game is sprinkled with a lot of fun and humor, and that this is actually one of the game’s strong points.

Not Unique but Still Addictive

Strangely enough it’s quite addictive. Maybe because it sticks so close with the tried-and-tested action RPG recipe. The world of Sacred 2 is massive and stretches from classic forest landscapes to fetid swamps. If you’re aiming at 100% completion of this game you could be spending well over a hundred hours on this game. When starting out, you pick either a good or evil character (depends on the classes). Should you tire of being Mr. or Ms. Nice you can always spice things up a little by acting like an asshole all the time.

Nicely crafted environments are plentiful in Sacred 2, but it has a slight problem with stuttering in the version I tested, although this may have been patched by the time you read this.

Sacred 2 Gameplay

The classes in Sacred 2 are somewhat odd – you get to choose from a Seraphim, an angelic or Valkyrie type of character (always female), High Elf, Dryad, Temple Guardian or Inquisitor. The Temple Guardian feels a bit out of place, as it’s some sort of robot with a laser rifle for an arm. Otherwise the characters are more or less self-explanatory of you’ve played this type of game before. Furthermore you get to choose between a good or evil path and customize the character with a deity, which gives you a perk such as summoning a huge demon if you choose the evil god Ker.

As usual, you start the  game with minimal skills and equipment, and as the game progresses you get to choose from a skill tree of additional perks. Eventually you may also acquire mounts to speed up travel. Otherwise there’s nothing original about the game play – left click to attack and right click to cast a spell.

Sacred 2 also comes with a multiplayer mode, which at the time of writing is quite buggy. When browsing the game’s official forum it looks like there are a lot of complaints about problems with connecting to game servers and such. Hopefully this will be fixed with a patch or two in the near future, but as of now the multiplayer mode is not recommended.

Conclusion

How do you summarize a game like Sacred 2? If you enjoyed Diablo 2 and want a game to fill the gap before number 3 arrives, then this could be it. There’s certainly nothing groundbreaking in this game, but it’s still a good hack ‘n slash RPG. To top it off, Sacred 2 is a lot of fun, and it looks like the developers had a lot of fun creating it.