Sacred Review

Visually, Sacred boasts a pleasing mix of 2D landscapes and fully modeled 3D characters and creatures. Even though the backdrops appear slightly outdated, especially when you zoom in, there's a pleasing amount of nicely drawn out details, such as trees, flowerbeds, bushes, and so on. Water surfaces look cool as well, and there's a whole choice of impressive and colorful spells to see. The camera allows you to zoom in on the action at any given time... even then the models appeared to show a meticulous approach in design and animation.

Hey, I can't see a damn thing!

Faster horsy, faster!

The game's audio is quite good. Gamers will be immersed the whole time thanks to a jumble of realistic ambient noises and a range of sweet tunes. The voiceovers are okay, but there's really not much to involve you there I'm afraid. Everything else seems to be in place.

Multiplayer fans are going to get their money's worth that's for sure. Sacred has two different MP modes: Co-operative and Hack 'n' Slay, both of which are appealing in their own ways. The co-op allows four players to march through the entire game's story, while the Hack 'n' Slay supports up to 16 players in monster-infested Internet or LAN matches. The only problem with the multiplayer, however, is that players are reporting a lot of bugs, which hopefully should've been ironed out in the recently released patch.

If you decide to purchase this game, you won't regret it. There are no breakthroughs in terms of general design involved, but the open-ended gameplay and an admirably lengthy single-player campaign is enough to the fancy of any gamer. If we disregard the relatively weak plotline, this is really an enjoyable RPG experience with enough content and replayability to keep you occupied for days. Plus, this is one of those rare games I feel the incentive to play again after I'm done with the review...