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Review - Sacred 2: Fallen Angel

Formats: PS3, X360 & PC
RRP: £44.99
Buy from £29.96
Released: 05 June

As gussied up as Sacred 2: Fallen Angel is, underneath it’s a very traditional, top-down, dungeon crawling, hack-and-slash game. This is no bad thing though: it’s a well-loved genre that’s been crushed underfoot by glossy FPS and third-person action adventures, many of which are all bluster and no content.

You know where you are with a game like Sacred 2. You’ll roam a massive landscape slashing away at every beastie and ne’er-do-well that comes near you, picking up their loot, armour and weapons, and building your character’s stats, attacks and magic abilities. You take on every mission and side quest that comes your way, most of which will involve killing more beasties and gaining more loot. There’s no point listening to the story: just run for markers on the map and kill everything that looks at you funny.

Sacred 2 brings very little to high-def console gaming, but again this is no bad thing. The menus are hard to traverse, the controls too convoluted, with different face buttons being assigned to your own customised move set. The customisation of your characters’ skills and weapons with runes and items is too vague to be understood. Often though, console versions of these kinds of PC games are dumbed down to a ridiculous degree – and in a way it’s quite nice to have to bumble along and feel your way through the character development here. You’ll certainly have plenty of time to get used to it: the map, story and number of missions available are vast.

A good addition to the genre is the multiplayer available here. This is a game that benefits greatly from running around with your friends to complete a quest, or testing out your bitchin’ skill set-up and weapons against your mates in the adversarial modes. Sacred 2 is a perfectly serviceable hack-and-slash RPG, and fans of the genre will feel right at home.

7/10

Review by Kirsten Kearney