Review: Sacred 2

Since Sacred 2 has been out on the PC now for a couple months I'll limit my topics to relating directly with the Xbox 360 version that I played.

If you didn't know Sacred 2 is the sequel to Sacred which released back in 2004. At the time it was considered "Diablo"-clone. Which is to say that the core gameplay mechanics were similar to Diablo from Blizzard Entertainment. So if you are familiar with that game it should be easy to get a feel for it pretty quickly.

If you hadn't played Diablo or games similar to it in the past, its a pretty straight forward action RPG. Consisting of exploring a fantasy world and killing pretty much anything that gets in your way. This isn't to say there isn't a story. In fact there is quite a bit of story involved. A lot of it is centered around killing demons, undead, hobgoblins of many kinds, which restores balance to a chaotic countryside. The over-arching story it appears is to bring order to the world. Whether that be for Good or Evil is purely your choice.

Now for Sacred 2 they've come up with some fun classes to play as.

The Seraphim, an angelic race that was once the guardians of magic and power for the realm of Ancaria (in which the game takes place. Also the only class that cannot take the Dark path.)

The High Elves, a race of magic wielding elves who expand their territory and power through knowledge of magic.

The Dryads, a splinter race of elves who focus on natural magic and a balance with nature.

The High Inquisitor, something akin to a mage knight. Their lust for power and magic makes them the one truly evil class.(The only class that cannot take the Light Path.

The Shadow warrior, a warrior brought back from the dead to fight once more and also have necromancer abilities. Their goal is rather complicated. Mainly wishing to go back to their eternal peace.

The Temple Guardian, a cyborg built by an ancient race, whom they call the creators. Many have been destroyed or lost. You take on the role of a recently reactivated one who looks to bring order back to the world (or revenge against the seraphim should you take the dark path.)

So once you choose a class, you then have to choose whether you want to take a LIGHT path or DARK path.

The Seraphim can only choose DARK, and the High Inquisitor can only choose DARK.

I played 2 classes for the purposes of this review: The High Elf and the Temple Guardian.

Firstly I played the High Elf and immediately started a new campaign and also went online right away. I did this so I could talk to someone else just starting out. The settings for a multiplayer game are actually quite good. You can set the game to only allow friends or anyone to join you. I choose to let anyone join me, but I also limited the game to only allow someone within 2 levels of my character join. Which meant just starting only someone also just starting could join. I immediately had someone log into my game and we started working out how everything works.

Now I'll state my first real complaint with the game. Without reading the manual, someone could become confused with how the game sets up abilities for your character. In some games as you level you get access to new spells or abilities. Not so in this game. The way it works is that you loot runes from the enemies you kill. These runes are class specific and when you use them from your inventory it teaches you that spell. Should you get the same rune twice it upgrades that spell to the next level.

You can also loot runes for other classes which you can trade to people online, or trade them to a runemaster to convert into a rune for your class. Trading 1 rune for 1 rune does have a significant fee attached to it, but should you trade 4 runes for 1 of your class the fee is much more manageable. So since runes are random drops from enemies primarily, your character can feel limited should you be unlucky enough to not receive any runes as drops for a while. This doesn't always happen, but it did with my High Elf that I had made.

Being a magic-wielding class with only a handful of spells made me feel particularly vulnerable. The feeling I've gotten talking to people online is that by level 10 which is a couple hours into the game, you should have most of your main skills and even a few of them leveled up a bit.

Aside from a slow start, I soon had a few more people log into my game and we had a nice party going. It was relatively painless to work with other people in the party. The game has a very nice party system that allows you to transport your character to anyone in your game from the map screen. Also any quest completed by anyone in your party, regardless of where they are in the world, gives you credit and experience as well. So for the truly hardcore levelers working with a group that's spreads out and each does different quests will gain the most experience in the shortest time. Now this does limit the amount of content you get to experience, but it also eliminates the frustration of making sure everyone has the quests and can get credit which is a problem in many other RPGs and MMOs.

So my party set out and we covered quite a bit of ground. We finished the first few quests easily and started heading further afield. We ran into our first "Boss" type enemy in the hills to the Northeast of the first major town. The quest entailed killing the chieftan of the kobolds that were becoming a problem. He wasn't particularly difficult, but he did manage to catch one of our members unaware as we first encountered him and the chieftan proceeded to kill that lone player. We all quickly swarmed him under as our friend transported back to us from where he resurrected back in town.

The loot was fairly generic items for an rpg. Seeing as this was the first real boss though we weren't too worried. We were still in the gearing up phase of the low levels, which meant we still needed to find decent armor for each slot in our inventory. So we traded runes and armor amongst ourselves and set out for further adventures.

After a while I saved my High Elf and decided to try out the Temple Guardian.

This class was much easier to start it seemed. Relying mainly on a standard weapon for most of its damage at first, unlike the High Elf whose primary damage was spells that had cooldowns. The Temple Guardian starts out as he is uncovered by some looters at a ruin near town. They ran away as he came to life. Reactivated by an ancient hologram of a Temple Guardian it inputs a standard protect and serve command into your Temple Guardian then shorts out and disappears. So you search for items around the ruins and then set off for town to do just that.

The temple guardian has some interesting abilities, first of all his left arm is a gun which is its primary ranged attack. He can wield most one-handed weapons, such as swords, axes, and maces. He also can wield pistols in his right hand. Unfortunately this does not mean he dual shoots with both arms. Wielding a pistol he shoots ranged shots only. There are abilities that give him extra appendages and other unique spells. He has auras for defense and offense when fighting, as well as large area of effect abilities that do small amounts of damage, but over large areas. I'm sure if these abilities were leveled up sufficiently they would be quite devastating to large numbers of weak opponents.

Having had a taste of a couple of types of gameplay, really the only other issue I had was the multiple menus one had to go through to change spells and abilities or upgrade statistics after gaining a level. There is quite a bit of customisation involved in developing a character, both in the damage spells and abilities do as well as in what effects they do to enemies they strike. Some spells can have secondary effects of slowing a target down or stunning them, while other options increase the number of projectiles launched when you cast a spell. It all makes for a very detailed game, but with so many different menus the Xbox controller becomes tedious. If ever there was a game calling out for a mouse and keyboard accessory for the Xbox this would be one of them.

Now those two issues don't necessarily hurt the game's enjoyment. The game has many many many hours of enjoyment packed into it. With a high level cap of 200, and the ability to seamlessly go online and join friends or strangers and do battle against the computer or each other, I could see enjoying this game for quite a while.

On a side note, the voice acting can be both annoying and hilarious at times. Townsfolk and enemies say the oddest things. Hearing a Kobold say "I shoulda listened to my wife", as he gets blasted by an arm laser blast from my Temple Guardian made me chuckle.

So all in all I'd give the game an above average rating of 7.5/10.

There is a lot of fun packed into the game. Aside from a false start with my High Elf and learning how to traverse the not quite intuitive menu, the game itself is actually quite fun and challenging as you get deeper into it.

Dungeons and Dragons: Daggerdale

Xbox Live Arcade game.
1200 MS points

Score: 4/10

I’ll preface this review with this statement: This game reminded me of an arcade game from the late 90’s. Meaning: if this were the late 90’s, this would have been a great game.

D&D: Daggerdale attempts to bring more action and less stat adjusting to D&D. The game literally leaps over any story just to drop you into the action almost immediately. The context is an evil mage has built a tower, inside of a mine, and plans to lead an army against Daggerdale from it.

You have to find a way into the mine, break into the tower, climb the tower, and kill the mage. Anything else beyond this simple plan is mainly D&D flavor that may have more meaning to someone who either reads the books, or plays the tabletop game and has more knowledge on the races and factions mentioned. To me and most anyone else the names are meaningless things to hang the little dialogue on and create a false urgency.

The action is really the one thing they did get fairly well. The classes break down as: Wizard, Rogue, Fighter, and Cleric.

Each class has its own unique abilities that make it interesting. Wizards blink, Rogues tumble, Fighter can block with a shield, and the Cleric has a group heal (which gives xp [experience points] if he heals someone in co-op).

The classes also have their own unique spells which will be what you rely on more than anything as you level up. Each class starts with two to three basic spells or abilities. You earn points for each level that can be used to purchase more spells or higher ranks of spells, at increasing costs. The higher the rank means you can “charge” up the spell and it has added function or benefit.

I tried each class briefly but, then stuck with the wizard for a more extended play. I played through the first few levels by myself to get a feel for everything. The controls were a little odd but after a while I got the hang of them. The targeting is a form of auto target and lock on targeting that’s done automatically. Casting a spell, hold down the button and push the left stick in the direction of the enemy you want to hit. It will create a small red circle under that target locking the spell on that enemy. The odd part is that if another enemy crosses the path of the first one, your target circle will quickly change to that enemy rather than the first.

This caused a few times where I was trying to hit a healer at the back of a group of enemies and casting a spell that hits a front line unit instead. This really isn’t that big a deal since the enemies are quite dumb and move toward you slowly. You can maneuver around them easily and try again. The combat is basically this same formula over and over with varying enemy types. Even playing with more people in co-op, the difficulty doesn’t really go up.

Speaking of the co-op, unless you plan to play with friends or you consider loot stealing a kind of mini game in itself: don’t bother. Playing with random people, you either grab all the loot yourself or you lose out. Even at the chapter endings where a large chest appears for each player, a single player can run to each chest if they are faster than their fellows and steal all the loot.

Playing with a friend on the other hand is somewhat more enjoyable, but again it just makes a really simple game even easier to grind your way through.

The good points:
Simple loot grinding hack and slash set in a semi D&D-oriented game.
The action can get more interesting as the spells and abilities get more powerful.

The bad points:
The story is non existent; the dialogue is annoying with a low grunting noise rather than actual voice-overs. They actually have the non-player quest givers grunting during cut scenes while dialogue slowly types in above their heads.

The spells get more interesting, but all they do is throw more enemies at you so you can kill more of them more efficiently with your upgraded spells. So not really changing the difficulty of the enemies doesn’t really evolve with your levels. You fight the same basic three or four types that almost mirror the character classes themselves.

Overall: As I stated in the preface, if this game was 10 years ago it would have been an awesome game that would have swept arcades or been an awesome PC game in the vein of Diablo or Titan Quest. As it is, if you’ve got $15 bucks to spend on a game and can’t think of any AAA titles you missed out on from the bargain bin, then sure, you can spend a weekend grinding through this game. It IS a grind through, and the random background loading after quests causes confusion as you look for something else to do only to have the screen fade to black and come back at the same place you were standing with new quest givers nearby.

Score: 4/10