E for All 2008: Preview of Sacred 2: Fallen Angel

One of the many demos available to play at E for All this year was the anticipated Sacred 2. If you can’t stand to wait until Diablo III, but crave some slashin’ and some hackin’, this might be the way to get your fix. I noticed during character creation, that the game does not feature any character customization. Once you chose one of the 6 characters, it will be up to you to deck them out in proper gear to get them looking unique and hip.

Just hope Kurt Russell isn't one of the Enemies.

Character classes players have to choose from:

• Temple Guardian: Sporting helmets similar to the aliens of Stargate. These dog-headed warriors are half-man and half-machine.
• Dryad: The nature-loving hunter class.
• Seraphim:The Fallen Angel class, sporting a mix of magic and technology as her spells.
• High Elf: The game’s pure mage class.
• Shadow Warrior: A beefy melee class sporting some impressively sized pole-arms.
• Inquisitor: A dark mage-hybrid type class, who gets stronger as he becomes more injured.

Additionally, some of the classes have the choice to choose an either shadow or light character. The Seraphim and Inquisitor are respectively locked into their light and shadow alignment. One of 6 deities can also be chosen that will add more combat disciplines and quests for an added level of variety.

Single player and multiplayer games will seamlessly transition into each other. Unlike Blizzard games, characters will be stored locally, but any friends who are playing can join in on your game to help with quests or trade items. This seems to be similar to playing single player Diablo II over a TCP connection. So, you could easily build your character offline and use them online, and vice versa.
The game looks and feels like a Diablo clone, yet has a couple of neat features to set it apart from the crowd. One example: the camera can be adjusted to an over-the-shoulder, third person (WoW-style), or zoomed out for a point of view more reminiscent of Diablo II.

Angel Woman+Tiger=Recipe for success

I decided to sample the Seraphim class since there is no arguing that warrior angel women are awesome. The game features mounts unique to each class and the Seraphim have the mount of a Saber-toothed Tiger. The spell trees were spiced up a bit by allowing you to choosing how to improve them. For example, a disabling AOE spell could be improved by either increasing the duration of the spell or increasing the spell’s area of effect. The spell tree also included a list of “combos” which had not been unlocked yet, but intrigue me. Two spells available to my new Seraphim were a devastating-looking multi-hit melee strike and a small projectile spell.

Of course, there was plenty of loot to be found and collected, but one feature that was extremely useful during my booty-heisting was the Q key allowing players to pick up all items in a hefty radius. I instantly thought of my D2 days, where multiple small items and/or gold would drop and I was much too lazy to bother clicking on them all. The single key pickup was made for lazy gamers like me, and I welcome it wholeheartedly.

The game boasts 22 square miles of area map for characters to explore and reportedly, the entire map will be able to be explored free of any load times. Though I only got to journey through a small portion of the game’s world, it was true that I encountered no loading screens.

Since these types of loot-collecting dungeon-crawling games usually end up taking hour upon hour to explore completely, it is hard to give a complete preview. Sampling the game from character creation to light hack-n-slashing of some innocent turtles made it look like it has some potential. My biggest complaint was that I came across some chickens and deer in the forest and wasn’t able to slaughter them. Then again, I’m obviously a twisted person, so maybe other people wouldn’t care so much about that.

Sacred 2 is also planned to have a release on the PC on November 11th with Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 versions scheduled for February.