by Ascaron Entertainment

Member Reviews: Review Sacred Yourself!

Pros
•  huge game world to explore
•  free online play
•  numerous side quests
•  able to export characters online and offline seamlessly
•  good henchmen system
•  great value
•  continues to update content

Cons
•  use of horse needs improvement
•  can't fully buff henchmen
•  big red demon again
•  some paths in the game world can be extremely linear.

The Bottom Line - The best action RPG since Diablo 2.

Link: Official Site

Review

Not since Diablo 2 have I really enjoyed an action RPG. Yes, Dungeon Siege was innovative in a few ways and looked good, but the game play was not near as addictive as either of the Diablo games. Maybe it was having to constantly manage a large group everywhere you went. I am not sure but Dungeon Siege just lacked that special something. Now along comes this lesser known game, Sacred, that can draw you in very easily and keep you there into the wee hours of the morning. 

Like Diablo, Sacred allows you to adventure on your own for the most part. You do have various henchmen (a.k.a npc party members) that can tag along though. All you can really do with these henchmen is give them weapons and let them fight beside you but they allow you to focus on your own character and enjoy the game more. The way that the henchmen show up and leave also gives the game a great adventure feel. 

Speaking of quests, there are tons to go along with the main story. The main story is a little disappointing because it centers on a big red demon like Diablo, but the various side quests help to make up for this unoriginal choice. The side quests are easy to follow because they are tracked via the game's map system. As soon as you accept a side quest, a little blue mark will be left on the map to show you where to go next to fulfill the quest. These quests not only allow you to improve your experience and items, but they allow you to pick up the aforementioned henchmen to help you fight the baddies along the way. 

The game world of Sacred is so large that, besides the often-used portals, you are able to ride horses just about anywhere. Riding a horse can get you where you want to go in a hurry but there are some drawbacks. First, your henchmen can not ride a horse so you have to wait for them to catch up to you when you want to make good time somewhere. You will need to make good time in some places of the game world because the game has several dead-end paths that make it hard to navigate to some location despite the stellar map system.   Secondly and most importantly, you are extremely limited on what you can do while riding a horse. Thus, the horse feature is nice but could have had more of an impact on the game than it really does. 

A feature that does have an impact on the game is Sacred's online mode. Although not revolutionary like Battle.net was for Diablo, Sacred's free online play complements the game well. Instead of having separate offline and online players, Sacred allows the two modes to converge by letting you export your characters into either mode at will. This allows you to build up your characters offline so that you can group with more powerful players sooner. 

If the huge game world, plethora of side quests, addictive action, and free online mode were not enough to draw you into this game, Ascaron also adds free content on top of a planned expansion pack called Underworld. The biggest free content update will be called Sacred Plus and will add new weapons, enemies, quests, and areas to explore. Look for this update sometime this year. Besides Sacred Plus, the Sacred team has also worked on various patches to constantly improve game play. That said, Sacred is one game that definitely offers a lot of bang for your buck. 

Game Ogre's Rating (out of 10):

9.00

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