Sorry I could’t get my review up quicker. The game was late to ship, and to add to that, I got the red ring of death on my 360, and apparently it takes a month to fix and ship it back to me. Well, without further ado:

What is Sacred 2 you may be asking yourself? Sacred 2: Fallen Angel was not one of those highly-anticipated or big “pumped up” games that were advertised like crazy. To put it simply Sacred 2 is like Diablo, with a little different story and better graphics.

Sacred 2 is a standard hack-and-slash game developed by Ascaron, and published by CDV Software Entertainment, and Deep Silver. The story goes along the lines of this: T-Energy is what the world revolves around, and depending on how you choose you’re campaign, you will either be using good or for the bad that it has been so far.

So upon starting the game, you have to choose from the following classes: Seraphim, Shadow Warrior, High Elf, Dryad, Temple Guardian, and Inquisitor. I’m telling you the coolest of them all is the Temple Guardian, which human cyborg-dog that can stand on two legs, but talks like a robot. I know, some of the most awesome combinations of all times. Want more? The Temple Guardian can use a freaking laser gun! Other than that though, all of the different classes of a combination and changes of ranged attacks, weapons that they can use, armor, close-combat, and all of that good stuff.

From there you choose if you want to take part in the light or dark campaign. Both campaigns will take place in the same area. The only things that will differentiate the two campaigns are the quests that you will go on. Quests are obtained by when talking to people around towns and areas in the world. You can then choose one of the six gods to worship, each with powers to help you with your campaign. (I just winged it). Lastly, you can choose a difficulty level to play. These include bronze, silver, and gold; although you can only choose from bronze and silver at first.

Once you’re into the game world, it is your typical hack-and-slash game; similar to that of games like Diablo and [insert game here]. There are tons of enemies and animals to kill, as well as abilities to learn and weapons to collect. Take a look at your map though. The world is freaking huge, colorful, and very full of different things to fight. There are tons and tons of quests to help click your life away, as well as the thrill of leveling up and collecting more items: you’ve got a long game to play.

Okay, so on to the subject of quests. There are quests literally everywhere you go in the game, each varying in difficulty and subject matter. Some will have you take out a certain amount of soldiers around a town, then go find a crystal type deal, some you have to rescue somebody lost in the woods. The quests will often vary from town to town, and get harder as you progress through the game.

As you progress your character through the game, you will level up and you will get skill points. While this may sound like a feature that is in a bunch of RPG’s, you will get skill points that you will be able to add to certain features and attributes like dexterity, strength, endurance, magic, and so on. As you level up and get more skill points, the higher that you’re hp will get, and the better some of your attributes will get. No, that’s not the part that differentiates Sacred 2 from games that do the same sort of thing. Instead of leveling up and directly leveling up your combat skills, you have four sets of skills and abilities in the game: aspects, weapon skills, armor skills, and support skills. As you master each of these skill-sets in the game, you will learn new abilities. But be aware. There are an endless amount of skills in the various sets that you can learn, but you can only learn a total of 10 for one character, so choose wisely and don’t screw up.

To improve your characters combat abilities in the game, you’ll have to collect and use none other than…runes. No, this isn’t RuneScape – settle down. It’s pretty straight forward. You have a skill, you can find a rune and that will increase it by one. You can trade and sell runes to people in the game, and these will directly affect the 10 skills that you are allotted during the game.

The game runs great, I had no problem with the pacing at all, and traversing through the expansive map was easy enough. The game also looks very polished, and you can tell that some serious time went into the design and development of Sacred 2.

Like I said before, the game is a solid hack-and-slash, and if you are a fan of the genre, or you are new to it like I am, you will have no problem learning how to do everything. Because really, who has to learn how to play a freaking hack-and-slash?

The game has a multiplayer mode, which you can play on either Xbox Live with 4 players or local co-op on one or more screens with 2 people. I played the co-op in the same room with a friend I thought it was super fun and I think I actually had more fun playing that than playing single-player. Granted you can change the camera at all, you get to make fun of what you’re characters say when they kill somebody, and I think that cooperating with somebody in a hack-and-slash in an environment such as Sacred 2 keeps you entertained and doesn’t bore you after the first hour or two.

All in all the game was pretty good. I played it on the Xbox 360, so I didn’t have as many of the bugs and problems that PC users had. The game looked great and played pretty well, and the hack-and-slashing in the game worked great. The co-op is fun and the pacing as you level up through the game wasn’t a problem with. The downsides is that if you can resurrect fallen enemies or animals (like Bremmy was prone to doing every second), their artificial intelligence is pretty much crap, so you can’t really depend on them much. The camera can be annoying at times but can easily be overlooked if you haven’t played hack-and-slash’s before, and the dialogue to say the least, leaves a ton to be desired. So if you’re picking the game up for the PC, know what you’re getting into, and look up the bugs and problems. But if you’re picking the game up for the PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360, go out and rent it first, and see what you think about it. It’s a solid game, but if you don’t like it, you really won’t like it.

What I liked:

Hack-and-slash: The hack-and-slash gameplay that was developed by Ascaron is pretty flawless. The combat is solid, and the gameplay that Sacred 2 was built to be is accomplished well.

Co-op: The co-op option in the game is pretty sweet. I played it with Bremmy and had one hell of a time making smart-remarks about what the characters were saying, and just interacting and completing quests with one-another was fun. I would honestly have to say that the co-op in the game, for me, was better than the single-player experience. When playing single-player, you feel like you’re just going through the motions, going through monotonous tasks, and all of that. With co-op, you’re kind of interacting more, and personally I just thought that it was a ton more fun.

Leveling-up: While this may seem like a weird thing to actually “like” about the game, I really like how in the game, as your character levels up, the characters and monsters in the world level up alongside you. This adds a nice challenge to the game, and it keeps you awake and not just constantly clicking all of the time knowing you can kill anything in your path. This is definitely something that other people may dock the game for, as it could induce having to go through dungeons 2 or 3 times.

Size of the game/map: The size of the game is just amazing. The world comes jam-packed with amazing graphics and details, as well as tons of quests, events, monsters to defeat, and amazing things to learn. I mean, check out the image in the post of the guy riding a tiger. I mean, that’s a guy riding a tiger. EPIC.

What I didn’t like:

Character AI: The artificial intelligence for your minions if just ridiculous. I mean, all of the characters (say, if you have the ability to bring them back from the dead) are slower than you are, which means they fall behind everything you’re doing (worse if you’re playing co-op), and will have to warp back to your location given they haven’t already been killed.

Camera: The camera used in the game, instead of being a typical isometric view, is pretty much top-down. In the co-op mode of the game you can’t change this, but during the single-player campaign, you can zoom in and out and change the angle.

Dialogue sucks: To be blunt, the dialogue in the game just flat-out sucks. I mean after defeating every couple of enemies or so, you’re character in the game will yell out something ridiculous, and throughout most of the game, after talking to 1 or 2 people, you will have tendency to not listen to what they say because it’s probably of no importance.