I Am One of the Seraphim
It may not be perfect, but Sacred 2: Fallen Angel fulfills most of your random item hunting needs.
Published: May 28, 2009
Once you pick a class, it’s time to figure out how to actually start a game. There is no “Start Campaign” option. You’ll need to create a match, designate its difficulty, whether it’s online or offline, and the range of character levels that can access it. If you want to make it online, you can leave it public so players can join you whenever, or set it to private, which only allows access to a player after you send them an invite. It feels more like creating an instanced scenario as opposed to starting a true campaign. If you’ve got a friend around, the two of you can tackle the game together. Just be aware that you cannot take a local multiplayer game online, nor will you and your pal be able to exchange items. You can scrap items in your inventory and make a bit of cash, but you cannot initiate a trade with a local player or drop items for them to pick up. You can make trades online, which makes you wonder why local multiplayer is so limited. It would also be nice to have four players offline, but it’s safe to assume this was left out due to technical limitations. Voice chat is possible online, which does ease the pain a bit.
If you haven’t guessed already, this game lacks a certain degree of polish that keeps it from being a must buy. The frame rate is good but not great and the landscape is drab and dreary. There’s a lot of it, but it isn’t all that interesting or varied. It’s also not that easy to navigate. Your mini-map shows terrain while your world map does not, which makes it difficult to plan long trips. Major areas are connected by roads, which you’ll learn to stick to for fear of accidentally climbing a hill you can’t get down from, making you waste time running back and then all the way around. Occasionally you’ll come across a puddle that must just be too deep, as crossing it is impossible. In cramped dungeons, which are disappointingly static, that becomes a major annoyance.
The menu system is a mess. Pressing R1 brings up a radial display giving you quick access to you inventory, combat arts and other important information. What it doesn’t give you access to is your skill menu. You have to open another menu and cycle using L2 or R2 to get to it. If you only ever used the radial menu you would never even know you had skills to learn. Further still, item, skill and combat art descriptions leave a lot to be desired. For example, the Temple Guardian has a cannon for an arm and can only use one-handed melee weapons. The cannon is technically a piece of armor and does not receive a bonus from any ranged weapon skills. Taking one of these skills could hinder a character’s long-term viability. And what about those damage types I mentioned early? You’ll need to manage attacking and defending against fire, ice, light, physical and other common damage types. But how do you know what kind of damage your weapon does? When you go into your inventory and look at a weapon, you’ll see this colored bar running through the middle of its description. That’s it. If it’s half yellow and half red, it does half physical and half fire damage. This information is the manual, but good luck finding it. When you come across the Kobold Chieftain who is resistant to physical and has a ridiculous health regeneration rate, you’ll need to know how to identify a weapon that does other types of damage.
This is a good time to point out how the game fails to capitalize on every opportunity for greatness it presents itself. The encounter with the Chieftain could have been something special and set a precedent for the rest of the game, but instead it turned into a simple battle of attrition. As I approached, the camera shifted focus to him and tracked his movements more than mine, which gave combat a more fluid and cinematic feel. Unfortunately that was the only cool part of the battle. Because of his absurd health regeneration, I was forced to stand in front of him, hold X and chug potions instead of skillfully dodging projectiles and looking for weak points. But perhaps this was just because I was playing on the Silver difficulty. When you first start, you’re given the option to play on Bronze or Silver. You’ll struggle for the first few levels on Silver at level one, but eventually it evens out and makes Bronze seem like the easy mode it pretends it isn’t. If you stay in Bronze for too long, you’ll quickly find your XP intake pathetic and any semblance of challenge all but gone.
