If you played Torchlight on Xbox Live, and you're looking for more, this is the game.
Don't get me wrong, I've played Gears Of War and Modern Warfare and enjoyed them both. I'm not the kind of gamer that hates something just because it's popular. It's just that, let's be honest, after the third sequel of what is essentially the same game with new weapons and three new baddies, those sequels start to lose their charm.
That being said, I'm fairly new to the dungeon crawling, level grinding style of gameplay that you'll find in Sacred 2. What actually brought me here was the release of Torchlight on Xbox Live. And while I loved that game and played a good 30-40 hours of it, I wanted more variety. Lots of people recommended Sacred 2. But what about these mixed reviews, I thought. Gamespot gave it a 7. I've seen some reviews go as low as a 2 out of 10. And while I try to ignore those kinds of extreme reviews that say it's the worst game they've ever played, it still gives me pause. Do I really want to drop a twenty dollar bill on a game that might really be that terrible? I took the plunge anyway.
I'm glad I did.
Let me come right out and say that I've only played the game for seven hours. While that is very short of a full review (I could see someone sinking well over a 100 hours into this game and never seeing anywhere close to everything), I feel that I've got a good enough grasp of the game to give an opinion. So let's get the most criticized aspect of this game out of the way: the camera. It's frustrating. At least, it is at first. It's locked at a wierd sort of angle that is somewhere between top down and over the shoulder so that you can never see very far ahead of you. For the first hour or so, I kept zooming the camera in and out, trying to find a happy medium between being able to see ahead and yet close enough to see the action. After the first hour though, I just got used to it. That doesn't mean I'm willing to overlook the issue. I'm not. The issue could have easily been remedied by giving the player the option to tilt the camera. It's just that it isn't such a big deal as to be a game breaker.
What might be a potential game breaker for some are the freezing issues. As I've already mentioned, I'm only seven hours in, and yet I've had the game freeze twice on me. There was no exiting to the dashboard and reloading either. It was get up, turn off the console, and restart everything. Granted, both freezes happened in the same dungeon, and it wouldn't have been that big of a deal since lots of games freeze. The problem is the game's save system. While you can save any time you want, the game does not save your location in the world. And because the game world is so massive, it takes a long time to get anywhere. So between those two freezes, I lost twenty of play time. In the end, I simply decided never to go into that same dungeon. The real issue though, is that it makes me a little wary of entering any dungeon. Perhaps more play time will ease those concerns.
Also, a lot of negative criticism has been leveled at the quality of voice acting, and I'm not really sure why. When your character tells you that his hobbies are murder and manslaughter in a Guy Smiley commercial voice, you know it was done on purpose. This is not the kind of game that takes itself so seriously that everything has to be "grave" and "epic" and "earth-shattering." There's room to laugh. And that's part of this game's charm. Enter a village full of kobolds, and you're bound to start laughing when you begin knocking them dead with your war hammer in what becomes a kind of slaughter of garden gnomes. Make no mistake though; just because this game is light hearted on the surface, doesn't mean it's not a proper RPG underneath.
There's enough stats and character building to satisfy the hardest of the hardcore. I've found a steeper than usual learning curve with this aspect of the game, but that's because I've had such limited experience with games like this one. Don't get me wrong, I'm a Dungeons and Dragons geek from way back. I played a good 600-700 hours of Oblivion and Fallout 3, and as I've already mentioned, I really liked Torchlight. The scope of this game, however, is deeper than all of those. This is the kind of game you can get lost in. And get lost you will.
In my short playtime, I only managed to see something like five percent of the gameworld. When other reviewers called this game enormous, I had no idea what they really meant. This game world is larger than any other open world game I've ever played. When GTA: San Andreas came out, I was blown away. When Oblivion released, I was shocked. And when I played Just Cause 2, I simply couldn't believe a single game disk could hold that kind of information. This blows all of those away. Big Time. It's a game that's so expansive, I have trouble believing I'll ever see the other side of the map. But that's what I wanted. And for a game world that big, you'd think some other aspect would have to suffer. But nothing does.
Sure, the graphics aren't Bioshock quality, but this isn't a corridor shooter either. Here there are rivers and valleys, trees and the occasional ruins. You'll find dungeons and villages and quests everywhere. Within my first few hours, I had a half dozen quests. A few more hours after that, I was passing by quests because I felt I already had too many. But that's the beauty of it. When a game offers so much that you don't feel you have to do everything just to get your money out of it, it's doing something right. In an age where DLC is becoming the norm---you know, where you have to pay an extra fifteen dollars for something that should have been given to you for the sixty dollars you already paid, Sacred 2 is a breath of fresh air. So jump on in and get lost. This game is everything you've been looking for.