A decent Action Role playing designed with full awareness of its predecessors' the limitations.
Sacred brings us to the realm of Ancaria, a fantasy world full of wonders. Once day Ancaria's peace is endangered by Shaddar, an evil and ambitious wizard when he summons Sakkara,an offspring of the Demon King Worganar from the realm of darkness. Unfortunately, the rite is interrupted by one Shaddar's servants and the demon escapes from his control. Ancaria, of course, falls into misery until the Advent of a Messiah.
If you expect something revolutionary in this game, you should be disappointed, for Sacred still follows the regulation that earlier Action Role Playing have formed. The developers' effort is mostly spent on renewing features at detail level of game play, hence, players can not see it at once. As a result, you still start the game with a familiar procedure: creating a character which falls into one of six classes (Gladiator, Battlemage, Dark Elf, Wood Elf, Seraphim, Vampiress) with different skills and talents. One thing to notice is that this part has been considerably simplified so that it should take only one or two minutes (a striking difference from Dungeon and Dragon RPG which overwhelm its players with cumbersome class and skill systems). Afterwards, you go straight to fighting, which actually means clicking as much as possible without any concern for complicated rules governing the game, for this type of RPG usually dismisses these rules from its game play. Unfortunately, it is here that several annoying flaws defect the quality of combat in Sacred.For example, your character's AI is so low that it usually stands still taking damage when you stop clicking; on the other hand, while there is an obstacle on the path to the target, it usually fails to find another way and gets stuck.
For an action focused game like this, prolonged dialogues do not usually appear because their role is instead undertaken by the drag and drop feature, which allows players to get what they want as quick as possible. However, item upgrading often plays an important role. Good execution of this will make the game much more interesting. Sacred offers a plessant surprise here when players can upgrade their equipments by talking to certain smiths while rune stones are used to unlock different combat arts. One character can only use the runes of its own class, leading to the need for exchanging runes throughout the game. Furthermore, spending time collecting runes of the same class can be rewarding since you can later combine them to unlock special attacks called "Combo". Nevertheless, it is really sad that these Combos only look great but prove somewhat useless in battle. Your enemies are usually stay out of the radius of the combo you are using and once you finish it, they will come to finish you! Because you already spend all your mana on your performance, the only way to survive is running away. Therefore, my advice is to use runes separately rather than combine them.
As for the control system, though Sacred bears striking resemblance to Diablo, it still has something of its own. The control panels consists of two areas: the left part for weapons and right part for magic and specialities. Each part contains a number of slots you can assign your favoured abilities to. The interesting point is that this number will increase up to five when your character progresses in levels and thereby allows more talents to be used at once. At high difficulty setting, you will certainly feel a great satisfaction whenever gaining a new slot, since it opens up more alternatives in combat and raise your chance to survive.
Another strong point of Sacred is the huge world it builds up. Instead of restricting you to certain areas and gradually opening up new ones after you fulfill some quests, the game allow free travel throughout over 70% of its realm. Only 30% left is quest-restricted. Not only wide, Ancaria also contains 16 small regions each with its own terrain, climate and
bestiary, from boundless deserted waste land to frozen snow snow-caps... However, a large portion of the scenery is covered with the green of forests and meadows. Though all background scenes are designed in 2D, they are still beautiful and show carefully taken care in details. Contrary to the background, character models are all in 3D. Camera in game allows adjusting view angle rather freely as well as zoom in and out in its perspective, hereby makes it convenient for players to enjoy every detail of their character model, from costumes, facial features to muscles and lissome movements.
There are several other small, intriguing features differentiating Sacred from previous Action RPG. The most remarkable is travelling part. In addition to teleporter scheme like in Diablo, the game allows you to obtain horses to ride on. On horse back, the time spent on travelling will reduce considerably. Your horse can also fight the enemies though not very effectively since they are easy to die. Hence, it is wiser to keep them away when you are engaged in battles. It is not simple to travel by horse. Not only money to buy one is required,but you also need proficient riding skills (more than level 2). Besides, you can tame a wild horse for yourself. Supporting NPCs is another thing Sacred implements in its own way. Players can provide them with some equipments but it is not possible to buy a escort. Certain NPCs only appear during a quest and leave you afterwards, and not all of them can fight, so you become a baby-sitter sometimes.
Though it can be compared to Diablo and Dungeon Siege in terms of originality, Sacred is a solid Action Role Playing which offers some worthy innovation in detail level of game play.