A review
When I was young, I would ride to school on a delapidated bus. My only amusements on this journey were doing my homework from the night before, partaking in the foodfight upstairs, or watching the many diverse bugs in the window. Watching bugs, especially finding ones you hadn't seen before, was quite the sport, and perhaps it is this same aspect to Sacred 2 which offers the most appeal for the game. It has so many bugs, finding new ones can be quite exciting!
So, I'm playing Scared 2 with two friends on PS3. Lag is poor, as bad as Guild Wars on a bad day with characters blipping around. Kinda hard to race a mate to the next quest point when on your screen you're ahead of him, but on his he's ahead of you! Online craps out after about an hour, with players running different instances of the game :
"I'm fighting these kobolds," Richard says.
"What kobolds?" I reply, seeing a empty field and Richard's Egyptian Dog Jaffa swing around merrily like a crazy person. We've all done it. We've all fought invisible foes, nothing more than the figment of our PS3's imagination. We've also moon walked on the spot and seen our character attack willy-nilly regardless of what we want them to do.
We've also lost character progress. Sometimes you can save the game, which only really saves you character if you're a lackie instead of the game host. But sometimes it refuses to let you save. You ask to save, it makes a rude noise, and that's that. If you leave the game which should autosave, it takes you to a loading screen for the rest of your life. Or until you reset the PS3. We did play one evening 3 hours in a row without any problems. We don't know the cause or why it worked once but not the other times. On the plus side voice chat in clear and reasonable robust, excpet sometimes when nearing the one-hour 'game's about to die, who can't we hear now, quick save and exit and turn off the PS3s and start again to get another hour's play' mark.
The online campaign is also a typically rubbish hacked-on feature. Developers fail to understand what friends want in an online campaign. Instead of us all being part of one big mission, the host has a mission and quests, and the rest just tag along. Our character's own stories aren't progressed (if we play solo with the same chars, they start right back at the beginning. Hooray, we get to do all the same quests again!); we don't keep the same mission log, so I have no idea where the next quest is; and we can't change host. It's in essence one individual game with online tag-alongs. That's par for the course, but it still sucks, and I wish developers would universally twig what an online coop campaign is and how it should work.
Levelling and skills selection requires frequent referencing of the online wiki. There is insufficient explanation of what the skill improvements actually do ('A chance to cause a deep wound'...What sort of chance?! 1% or 70%?!) and most importantly, no opportunity to change your mind. Even putting in a skill point, it's immediate, with no cancel option. My Dog-Man companion has a skill he'll never use because of this clumsy interface. So you really want to know you're not wasting those skills points, especially when some of the skills are just broken. eg. Blacksmithing does absolutely nothing on the consoles. The Riding skill has virtually no value, but you wouldn't know that without having played the game for some tends of hours and tried a mount.
The game looks okay when you're standing still. There's nothing clever in the lighting or shading departments, but the textures and designs are very detailed and it's 1080p. Just don't start moving! Framerate is ghastly, stuttering and with frame tears everywhere. It reminds me of playing Never Winter Nights on PC, although that at least had high framerates with v-sync off. Sacred 2 is very painful for a console game. Start running past mobs on a horse and it slows to a Disney animated feature, 12 fps. If you're lucky. Spell effects are very tame. If you've ever played CON, you'll know what spell effects and particles can be like. Sacred 2's are the opposite. The water looks very nice though, with the waves very convincing.
A nice feature is mapping actions to whatever face buttons you want. An attack is achieved by equipping the weapon to a face button, and then presing the button. I have a ranged-attack bow on X and a melee sword on Square. Using these weapons however can be a lesson in irritation. You can't target enemies of your choosing, other than vaguely pointing in their direction. You just hold the attack button to keep attacking whoever the AI thinks you are wanting to hit. I point at a Baddy in the distance and hold the X to shoot arrows. It decides to target the wolf slightly nearer. I hold the X and keep shooting until the wolf is up close and biting my ankles. He's now joined by about 50 kobolds. I think to myself, being quite a seasoned fantasy action game player, "If I were surrounded by angry kobolds, I'd be better off with a sword and shield than a bow" and so I stop pressing the X button and press the Square button. But my character has other ideas, and instead carries on shooting. Yep, they don't change weapons when you want them to. I have to stop attacking for a while before I can switch correctly. And by a while, I mean long enough for the kobolds to make serious design alterations to my armour. Even stopping for a second and pressing square again can continue with the bow.
Still, Sacred 2 passes the time. It's a fantasy action game with coop of this ilk, and so gets the sale and the play time. Calling it 'mediocre' is being a bit kind. The world is huge (too big IMO, actually) and very detailed. The gameplay elements are mediocre. The production values and polish are poor. The bugs are too many, disgraceful really, especially when we read in another thread than the QA process of the consoles is supposed to be pretty rigorous. The PS3 version also hasn't received any patches yet. Sacred 2 is a PC game poorly show-horned onto the consoles. Don't expect anything like a Snowblind game. It's entertaining enough to play, unlike Untold Legends : Dark Kingdom, but if you aren't a fan of this type of game, you'll find no value in it.
I can understand Metacritic readers rating it 8.6/10 - stinky old lukewarm ditch-water is the tastiest, most refreshing drink ever if it's an oasis in the middle of a desert! But it really doesn't deserve it, even though I've spent hours playing the thing 