For bad guys, it’s almost impossible to find good help these days, and unfortunately for Shaddar, it couldn’t get any worse. In Sacred, the main villain is the eerie necromancer Shaddar. After his dreaded neglected past, he tries to regain his reputation through power, and what better way to do this but to summon a terrifying demon at your control. Unfortunately for Shaddar, one of his clumsy minions happens to screw everything up during the summon and the evil demon is now loose in the Realm of Ancaria and - if that wasn’t bad enough - a bunch of evil cults, bandits and mercenaries are viciously running rampage and causing all sorts of trouble. Times like these you’d wish someone were there to save the world. And that’s where the gamers come in.
Gamers can select one of six character types in Sacred, including a gladiator, a wood elf, and even a vampire. There’s very little customisation when it comes to moulding your character unfortunately - indeed, the only customisation is in the character’s name, a rather disappointing showing by 2005 standards. Though while each character adventures through the same demon-themed story, different characters start in a different location. For example, the Vampire will begin in an abandoned mansion, while the dark elf will begin in a cave. After a quick tutorial quest, the game progresses almost identically, regardless of which character you’ve chosen.
Each character can develop new abilities or spells over the course of the game, via rune stones that can often be found in well-hidden treasure chests, provided as rewards from quests or dropped by defeated enemies. There are over a dozen moves to be learned for each character that come as a rewarding prospect for gamers. For example, gamers who decide to choose the Vampire will have the ability to stay in human form or turn into a vicious vampire at a click of a button. In a sense, Sacred plays loosely as a RPG title as well as a hack-and-slash adventure title. As gamers battle enemies with their character they will acquire experience points that will later go towards gaining levels. Once gaining new levels, your character will gain new attributes and skill points, as well as being able to use certain weapons and items that weren’t accessible at previous levels. A remarkable downside to levelling up is, well, gamers won’t have a clue how to raise their abilities without reading the game’s manual. Maybe the developers carelessly forgot to add it in the tutorial of the game… it could happen, right?
Circle of Ice!
Sacred is presented in the massive game-world of Ancaria, which is 70% accessible for players from the get-go. Like Diablo, gamers can wander around the game-world, fight wild creatures and bask in the relaxation of a local village. Throughout your adventure you'll come across various quests – main quests and side quests included – that can often break up the tense and frustrating story of Sacred. Some of the quests will often have gamers travelling across the other side of the land to save a certain NPC, or killing off a horde of creatures that are causing havoc in a nearby area. The only real downside to these side-missions - and here's a bit of a downer - is that, erm, there's several that couldn’t actually be completed. Not because of the fact they were too hard, but that they were unfinished in their design. You would often complete a task and yet it wouldn’t register as being completed, or you just wouldn’t know where to locate these quests since they wouldn’t show up on your map. It's lazy game design of the highest order, and just one of many factors behind the score at the end of this review.
With most hack-and-slash titles, the combat aspects are often quite precise, and you wouldn’t expect otherwise in games that focus so heavily on fighting. Unfortunately for Sacred, combat is one of the game’s most pronounced flaws. The controls often don’t respond, making combat a nightmare at times. Sometimes you’ll try to attack, but your character won’t respond and will often stand there for reasons unknown. This becomes incredibly frustrating when you’re trying to fight off a horde of creatures to only find that you are clicking your mouse for absolutely no result in return. If that wasn’t enough, targeting enemies can often become a battle in itself. And finally, magical attacks often don’t show up graphically. While I could continue on listing all the combat problems, it’s more than likely you’ve got the point that the game’s combat is heavily flawed.
With such a huge world, you’d expect to be able to make some sort of quick access to certain areas, especially when your destination is on the other side of the world. Thank the heavens then for horses. Horses can be acquired in towns, and each horse often has it’s own advantages over other horses, say speed. While the idea of transport sounds fantastic for a huge game such as Sacred, the idea is terribly flawed, with the horse-riding incredibly frustrating. While on horseback, gamers are unable to use certain skills, moving often becomes clumsy as you try to position yourself and you can’t pick up items while on horseback. So whilst in theory the idea of riding a horse across an open world sounds fascinating, the idea caves in due to more half-arsed game design.
No point of using a horse here.
Another appalling problem in this game is its enemies. While there's an absolute massive collection of various enemies you’ll meet along the way – dragons, goblins, trolls, you name it they’ve got it, and well done on that, chaps - meeting these enemies is positively painful, for all the wrong reasons. The game features a regeneration sequence for these creatures that will have players tearing their hair out. Creatures regenerate constantly, often a huge burden when trying to travel across huge spaces without any potions. You’ll most likely die without a significant amount of health potions, you’ll regenerate at your quest checkpoint, you’ll go to town and buy as much potion as humanly possible, and then you’ll go past that exact same spot you died from last time and find that all the enemies you killed last time are back! This often creates a huge mass of enemies that become far too impossible for you to defeat, which often leads to you trying to ride past these enemies without fighting them, which then halts any possibilities of gaining levels. If for some reason these wild creatures follow you into a town and you happen to be talking to a merchant and buying new stock, which you’d think would pause the game outside, well unfortunately it doesn’t. You’ll often die because enemies are slaughtering you whilst you’re trying to buy new stock. You will scream with frustration.
Sacred makes a big deal of it's ‘customisation’ features. Unfortunately (seems like a common word in this review now), these features are often useless and fall flat on their backside in the shadow of what they easily could’ve been. You can create various special combo attacks by chaining together your special abilities, but there’s no reason for this since using your best attack repeatedly ends up being more effective.
Quite an array of magical attacks.
As bad as this game already sounds, things just happen to get worse. For a game that was released in 2004, you’d expect that the graphical presentation would at least be up to scratch with it’s current generation standards. As the screens here suggest, it has some way to go - the environments look flat, character models are weakly detailed, animation on all creatures (horses, humans and enemies) look downright awkward.
The musical soundtrack is probably the only real saving grace of Sacred, which isn’t particularly hard with a game like this, although it isn’t exactly stellar either. The voice acting is rather plain and lacks any real emotion or talent, sounding like a bunch of sixth-form drama students at rehearsals. And in keeping with the general feel of the game, the sound effects of characters and weapons are most politely described as 'extremely amateurish'.
The single-player mode of Sacred is already incredibly huge as it is, but the developers have also added a multiplayer option, including LAN, closed and open Internet. There’s quite a bit of variety in this feature, as you’ll be able to select co-op play of the main storyline, or hack and slash and player vs. player modes. While the co-op play is only restricted to up to four players, the other two modes have a sixteen-player limit. The game’s multiplayer aspect is a massive positive and can often be enjoyable if you have a reasonable internet connection, or know a bunch of friends. As it stands, these modes can often become much more enjoyable than the single-player experience itself.
Multiplayer: the only positive of this game
Sacred could quite possibly one of the worst games PALGN has had the misfortune to play. While the game withholds a few positives that can often be fun, the downfalls of this game are just far too apparent, and make this game incredibly amateurish in it’s production. While there are patches out there that fix several problems found within the game, a lot of the issues still remain, and it’s remarkable that a company could release such a bug-ridden game in shoddy condition and expect it to go well.
While Sacred offers some unique and exciting areas, and is a much larger game than Diablo, it’s still highly recommended to immerse yourself in the compelling experience of a real, and clean, action/RPG title in Diablo II, a game four years older than Sacred and still much better.
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