"Here, wander around a bit...the game." Sums up Sacred 2: Fallen Angel, or at least the first few hours. We feel it's difficult to review a game we've only played for a smidge, but really, if it takes that long to get enjoyment out of something, you may as well spend your time brewing and aging your own wine; only instead of letting it sit in a cellar for a few years, you watch it. You sit there, and you watch it instead of going out and enjoying life; which is tantamount to playing Sacred 2.
The main issue we faced was simple: We didn't know what in the Bowser's trousers was going on, or what we were supposed to be accomplishing. The only semblance of a story we came across was a bad 90's era action scene, and a brief parting moment with our "teacher", who had us shank a fellow student. This was followed by nothing...and we mean NOTHING...but faffing about. Sure, we ran into several other creatures...and killed most of them while our characters made remarks about their need to pick up lotion in the next town, or how they hoped the criminal scum we were decapitating "didn't smell.". But this wouldn't have been so bad had we had a destination, or a reason to be killing the poor foul beasts; but no, the game world is simply so aggressive that no child would ever be capable of walking outside the family milk farm without being mugged by five passing turtle monsters. Now, we weren't completely without a sense of direction. There was a nice little blue arrow on our compass. He taunted us. He led us into a myriad of waist-high trolls and giant rats. Interestingly enough, all the efforts of these trolls, rats, and angry turtles was all for naught; as we were playing co-op...which in the universe of Sacred 2, apparently means dying is a mere inconvenience on the same level as running out of milk. Except even this game could make running out of milk more difficult than getting Tom Cruise to appear his actual height. The inventory and leveling systems are needlessly complex; the management systems were so unintuitive they could only have been designed more poorly by someone from the 1960's who had never seen what a computer menu should look like. Also, on the topic of visuals... the game was shiny, if you can tolerate 5-10 FPS shiny. In fact, the only thing we enjoyed were the rag-doll corpses.
While there are SEVERAL other things we could gripe about (controls, combat system, the HUD, the camera, the portrayal of woman as seen through the eyes of a pubescent D&D player), we simply have to thank GameStop that they will buy the used game back. We were looking for a worthy successor to the amazing co-op console awesomeness that was Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance...and this game failed us spectacularly. Perhaps if our attention spans were days long, and we didn't demand instant gratification, it may have been tolerable...but they're not, and we do...so therefore it deserves to be taken back to whence it came...that lonely, lonely shelf on the GameStop wall where we hope it stays until the end of time...or until the oil spill reaches it.
>PopeVader
>EpicError
This is awesome.
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