This one is a shocker to me. The ending of this review is what has happened to me only due to a few games. But, before I tell you what it did to me, let me start at the beginning and walk you through what led me up to it.
The game, itself is a Diablo-esque point and click game. Very simplified, yet in its simplicity, it has the ability to be very fun. Combat is easy, it's easy to get up to speed on things like quest finding, attacking in multiple ways and bartering. The game's RPG element and story then try to deliver the knock out punch. This is something that the first Diablo did very well.
Sacred, however, did not. The first problem it had was that it seemed to think that it was so simple that it need not put out a good manual. The manual, although nice sized, had more "tips" in it than actual helpful information. It didn't really serve to help my gameplay, and I gave up referring back to it as the game went on.
Sacred did use its simplicity well in other ways. They had very cool streamlined quests. I'm all for a good dungeon crawl but if every quest involves 6 levels of dungeon to go through, I get bored easily. It's nice to have short, fun quests, too. And, Sacred does this well. Because they put in a lot of these short quests, they end up having more than average in the overall game, which I think is a great idea.
They also made it easy to stay on a quest using a pointer system that tells you where to go for each quest. It helps to not have to memorize or forage through secluded parts of the map. This way they could strike a balance between having a very large map and being able to enjoy not getting lost.
The large map did not get in the way of load times, either. They are very quick, and you don't notice the transitions at all from map to map. In fact, it feels like the entire map is loaded into your system every time that you play. It's that seamless. Plus, they don't block you from going anywhere in order to reign in your memory requirements. It is a great stroke of coding.
Sounds good so far? Well, this is where it all ends. This game may have been rushed to the shelves a little too early. I received many crashes and black screens (not to be confused with the blue screen of death, but its cousin.) I tried to fix this according to the manual and readme file, but to no avail. They even had patches on the web. Of which, they seemed to do nothing. The patches were probably just so that they could upload spyware or something.
The game play was meant to be point-and-click fun, but it was very hard to target foes. There was more clicking and pointing than needed to be. In fact, sometimes I'd run around a building when I thought that I was clicking on an orc. I'm bad, but I'm not that inept.
The worse part, although, was the regenerating opponents. I'm not a big fan of this normally, but this was the extreme. Not only did they re-spawn, but they did so at such a fast rate, it was hard to get from place to place. Often I would gain loot and go back to a store a short distance away, and it would be full of monsters again. I thought that I could outrun them when I got a horse. But, no! They have ways of making you kill them incessantly. I have no idea who the makers thought would enjoy this feature.
At one point, I cleared out a bunch of goblins at a vendor, and started buying and selling. I didn't even get half way through my transaction. I had to stop twice to defend myself. And this was not a function of this one certain vendor. This happened many a time.
This was so frustrating that I did what I've only done with three games that I've played before. I stopped before the game finished. I was doing a dungeon crawl and the game crashed. It was so badly coded that I couldn't restore my last save, and I had enough. I really just didn't want to go through the tedium of fighting to get back to the same place. Games are supposed to give you an escape from real life. I have enough frustration, tedium, and repeatable boring assignments in real life.
The funny thing is that the other three games that I quit have better excuses than this one. Two were micromanaging sim-type games which aren't my style. I just didn't take the time to learn how to play these two - my bad. The other was a 3-D game which used colors that I couldn't see well enough to tell what was in the near field and in the far field (I'm color blind.)
So, Sacred does worse than the worst. And yet, I won't give it a one star although it would be tempting. In trying to be as objective as possible, I can understand where people would find parts of this fun. Although, I don't believe anyone would enjoy the re-spawning. So watch out for this one. It appears to be one of the more overrated games out there. Don't get fooled unless you can accept the flaws that I mentioned.
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