Sacred 2: Fallen Angel

Prior to taking Sacred 2 home for a thorough review inspection, we quipped to anyone who was listening – pretty sure the cleaner cocked an ear as she hoovered under our desk – that: “The innkeeper needs our help. His cellar is overrun by rats and he needs us to kill them. By ‘overrun’, he means there are exactly ten.”

Now, to be fair, we had expected this to be our first missi… sorry, quest, but it wasn’t. Our first quest in Sacred 2 was actually to kill an innkeeper, which is turning things on their head pretty dramatically, you’ve got to admit. However, after only about 5-6 hours of play we had already been asked to clear not one but two critter-infested cellars. One was full of spiders, the other an uneasy alliance of zombies and – yes, you guessed it – rats.

If this little anecdote has brought a fond smile to your face, then you’re going to love Sacred 2. Ascaron has taken a genre steeped in tradition and, rather than dragging it unwillingly into the 21st Century with ill-fitting new ideas – that’s a dig at you, Too Human – has just pinned it down and pumped it full of steroids. Steroids and mashed potato. This is action role-playing with everything turned up to ten.

Look at these screens. You’ve seen grass in RPGs before, right? But you’ve never seen grass that green before, though, have you? Everything in Sacred 2 is like that grass. You’ve seen it all done a million times, but never with quite such rabid conviction. Ascaron has tried, and for the most part succeeded, to take everything that was great about PC RPGs during the late Nineties and make it all bigger and better without adding to it or updating it in any meaningful way. This is, it has to be said, a bit of a weird thing to do. Sacred 2 is a very, very likeable game, but is it really what gamers want in 2009? The fact that Ascaron has just gone bankrupt tells us the answer is: ‘No. Bugger off.’

For that reason, it’s hard to wholeheartedly recommend Sacred 2 to a hardcore 360-owning audience. Nonetheless, if you are of the opinion that the RPG genre just hasn’t been the same since the turn of the millennium, it’s an absolute must-have.