We quickly ran into combat and sussed out the whole system for returning blows. The fact buttons serve as a set of user-controlled weapons slots. Simply tapping that weapon let us attack with it, while the Circle button was pre-assigned to a combat art -- in our case a more powerful series of attacks that had a cooldown period before it could be used again. Though tapping multiple weapons wouldn't let us combo ranged and melee attacks due to having to put away the old weapon and bust out the new one, it did allow for quick and easy combat, which was really just waiting for the enemy to get in range and then tapping away until their life bar was whittled down to nothing. The d-pad held slots for potions and other restoratives, so it was really just about managing available consumables and slicing and dicing away at all manner of critters, monsters and even the odd human.

When a game has a dedicated button (in this case, L1) for scooping up loot, you know it's serious about offering tons of spoils and indeed Sacred 2 is a lootwhore's wet dream. Nearly every enemy felled coughed up something that was automatically dropped into our inventory, and by holding down the R2 button and using the left analog stick (a slightly clunky-feeling approach, but like all of Sacred 2's quirks, we eventually got used to it), the inventory could be pulled up. Now, interestingly, getting rid of items for cash doesn't require a lengthy trading process with a nearby vendor. You certainly can do that if you'd like, but we were pleasantly surprised to see that by just tapping the Square Button, we could ditch the highlighted item for cash. Yes, this is game where you gobble up everything in sight and then literally sell off the stuff you want to nobody for cash.

And here's where the interesting twist comes into play: it's actually fun. Our primal packrat tendencies were actually rewarded in this game, allowing us to scoop up any and all manner of loot and get rid of it -- for profit -- without having to make the usual painful trudges back to civilization to empty out our inventory. Given that seemingly every other character in the game (many of which will chat you up with voice clips as you pass by) has some kind of simple quest just aching to be resolved, there's no shortage of opportunities to fight, loot, sell and repeat -- all the while gaining experience and pouring additional skill points into the usual areas like dexterity, power, and so on.

About the only thing that actually stopped us (repeatedly, we might add) was the fact that our build of things would crash regularly about 45 minutes into a play session. It was an inadvertent saving grace, as we could have easily spent hours just running around and thumping on stuff while slowly leveling up if the game hadn't given us a break whether we liked it or not. A few other technical issues like loading pauses, the overworld map hitching when we brought it up and some framerate, plus a bunch of placeholder bits in the interface gave the unshakable impression of game still very much in progress, but then this was a weeks-old build that we'd put off playing.

It's actually a bit of a shame that we did, because (at least from our limited impressions) when the game started to really hum along, it was actually quite enjoyable in a mindless looting kind of way. We'll have to hold off on final judgment of the full experience once the review build rolls in, but what a difference actually playing a game makes, eh? We went from trying to avoid even booting the game up to calling dibs on the review once it comes in over the course of just an hour or so. And now you know about as much as we do about the game -- including the fact that one shouldn't judge things on minutes-long first impressions. Sacred 2: Fallen Angel may well have some legs to it yet. We'll give you the full review of things in a few weeks, but if you're a Diablo-bred loot farmer, this one's definitely worth putting on your radar. It's certainly on ours now.