Archive for June, 2009

I have to come clean right up front and say that I haven’t played the whole game through yet. If I waited to write this review until that happens, everyone would be wondering why I’m writing a review for a PS3 game when the PS4 has been out for years! This game is huge!

Graphics and Level Design

This game looks gorgeous. I love walking around and seeing little rabbits or frogs jump out of my way. I remember playing Champions of Norrath on the PS2 and thinking how great it looked. Now I think the same thing for the PS3 version of Sacred 2. The buildings look great, the grass looks great, the water looks great, the trees look great. There are really only two problems with the graphics. One is that sometimes trees or buildings obscure the view of your character. Even though they’ve taken steps to solve this problem, they don’t always work. Second is that there’s quite a bit of screen tearing. I mostly got used to it and so it only bothers me every once in a while. But if this kind of thing really annoys your knickers off, then caveat emptor.

I love the architecture. I just cleaned out a Kobold camp, and that area was great. The dungeons are a mite on the small side. It seems that you barely started exploring a dungeon when it’s over. But the world map is so big, you’re not lacking for areas to explore. But if you’re more of a dungeon crawler than a surface walker, then you should keep this in mind. So far I’ve only seen a small portion of the map, but I’ve been impressed so far.

Game Interaction

Yup, this game is a bit of a pain when it comes to the menus. You hold down R1 and then choose a function with your left joystick on order to go to your inventory or quest log or statistics or whatever. Often you’ll tap R1 again to bring up additional stats on a weapon, for example. It would make sense that tapping circle would remove just those stats, right? Nope – it closes the menu entirely. I’m constantly doing this by mistake, and then I need to re-enter the menu. So yeah, there are little things like this about the GUI that are painful, but it’s not as bad as I’ve heard some people say.

One cool thing is that the L2 and R2 keys are modifiers. They let you choose a whole different set of face buttons for you to use in game. That means you can have up to 12 weapons and/or spells within easy reach! That’s amazing, but it does take some getting used to. I put normal weapons on the unmodified face buttons, attack spells using R2, and buffs and defensive spells on L2. That works pretty well for me.

I still haven’t figured out how to pause the game.

Spells and Stuff

There are fifteen spells (“combat arts”) that each character class can use, divided into three groups, and you can level up each one of them and also add modifiers. On top of that, there are many skills you can learn, each of which you can level up. Some of the skills will improve your combat arts (there are six of these skills, two for each of the three combat art groups).

There are tons of weapons as well. Blow darts, blaster pistols, and the usual assortment you’d find in this type of game. You can sell items you don’t want to a merchant, or you can dispose of them while questing, though you won’t get as much gold for them that way.

Much of the fun of this game, of course, is the looting. Playing alone, things go as you’d suspect. You just pick up the loot by walking over it or hitting L1 to pick up all the loot within a certain radius. Playing multiplayer, though, things get frustrating. Often you can’t pick up loot because the game determined that someone else should really have a crack at it. Which is frustrating because my friend would be 10 meters away killing some baddies while I was doing the same. Then we would both try to pick up our loot and we can’t pick it all up! So we’d have to walk to each others’ areas of battle and pick up the loot the other person couldn’t pick up. On top of that, sometimes the game just doesn’t play fair. The other night I was getting quite frustrated by the fact that my character was picking up almost no loot except for gold while my friend was picking up all sorts of good stuff. This isn’t helped by the fact that, if you play local co-op, you can’t swap stuff with another player. You can only swap stuff with other people playing online.

Overall

Overall, I love this game. Does it have issues? Of course it does. But do I enjoy playing the game, and does it call to me when I really should be spending quality time away from the glare of my TV? It sure does. I really enjoy games of this type, and Sacred 2 is no exception. I’ll be putting many many more hours into this game. I highly recommend it.