Sacred 2: Fallen Angel Review

Let’s be honest – Sacred 2: Fallen Angel has plenty of flaws. It’s repetitive, the story is a footnote, and it showcases lame voice acting, absurd quests, and a host of glitches to boot.

However, the game has upsides that will keep you coming back to its massive world, managing to instill a bit of Diablo goodness within the world of Ancaria.

The game boasts six character classes, each with distinct advantages and disadvantages. There’s the all-around Seraphim, the elemental magic specialist High Elf, the natural mage Dryad, the laser-gun-toting Temple Guardian, the skeleton-raising tank Shadow Warrior, and the shadow version of the Seraphim, the Inquisitor.

I played the game as a Seraphim, a character that can only play the Light side of the story. The rest can pick either the Shadow or Light campaign, save for the Inquisitor (what with that whole “polar opposite of the Seraphim” thing.)

First thing’s first: the map is super ginormous! I played for about five hours and checked the map to see what I had discovered, only to zoom out and realize there was still so much to see.

It’s not so bad once you get your special mount, but the geography still feels a little too big for my liking. Logging 36 hours only to gather 40 percent of the map is a little much. That’s like a percent an hour!

Playing with friends helps, since you can teleport to their locations, as well as to portals and the last activated resurrection stone.

As for the special mount, as a Seraphim I got to ride a tiger. Bitchin’!

But for the map being so large, the game boasts a nearly loading screen free environment for up to 4-players online, or up to 2 characters on the same console (online or offline.)

But its that “nearly” that gets frustrating. Entering a dungeon in the world initiates a painless, short load screen; no big deal. However, set foot in a city and be prepared for your character to hit an invisible barrier. There’s also a charming, corresponding “disc read” icon at the top of the screen.

But wait! There’s more! This will happen every few steps — about 3 or 4 times — until the town is fully loaded. A pain in the ass if you ask me, especially when the open world maintains its seamless qualities with more characters on screen.

While there are tons and tons of sidequests to do, the main quest is the the bread and butter, taking you through all the of the map’s regions for some pretty epic boss fights along the way (anyone up for some dragon slaying?).

The side quests can vary from the incredibly lame (why can’t you run across town yourself to talk to this person?) to the amazing: Go out and fetch real-life band Blind Guardian’s instruments so they can put on a concert for the game’s monsters in a cut scene. F*cking metal!

I wished they would have incorporated more metal within the game when I was slaying the millions of creatures littering the plains — there was a seemingly endless amount of rats infesting ALL of Ancaria.

Also, I completed one quest in which an NPC’s text bubble read “TODO-TEXT MISSING.” Whether this is humor on the game’s part (and I do believe there are some playful jests included by the Sacred team), or simply unfinished coding, I know not.

Escort missions are a still pain in the ass. When you find the person you are suppose to be transporting, he/she runs right into the fray of a mob and quickly gets killed; What the hell did you think was going to happen asshole? This will leave you with an uncompleted quest.

The games suffers from frame rate issues that range from a bit of clipping to chug-a-chug moments when the screens fill with large, jaggy, solid color shapes in which you pray the game doesn’t crash (it crashed twice when I was playing). Thankfully, your character saves after every completed quest. But if you’ve just been exploring the lands for a while, a crash can leave you fuming.

In addition to this, often times you will find your character rooted to the ground for no reason. There is a root spell that some of the monster use, but this can happen even with none of those monsters around, leaving you stuck until you cast a spell or perform an action.

Despite the numerous hiccups, Sacred 2 kept me coming back. I found myself up at 3 A.M., telling myself to go to sleep after I entered the next city only to find myself running around doing quests in said city for another hour.

The game boast five difficulties, a level cap of 200 (which means plenty of grinding), and lots of set and unique items to find. Those looking for a decent hack n’ slash action RPG with find Sacred 2: Fallen Angel to satisfy their hunger for many, many hours.

The game is definitely meant to quest along others online and hopefully there is an update on the way to fix at least a few of the bugs with getting stuck and escorts.

(Game Main quest completed on Xbox 360 on bronze difficulty; 36 hours logged)