7.0 from GamespotClick me for the review.The Good
* Solid, if mostly traditional game design
* Wide range of quests
* Good variety of enemies and monsters
* Gorgeous visuals and offbeat audio.
The Bad
* Bugs make the game unstable
* World map is massive and convoluted
* Poorly developed main plot.
Unfortunately, a few unwelcome curves are also present in the form of a fair number of bugs. Characters can fall through floors and get stuck in the scenery, or wind up jammed in apparently clear areas and then have to stagger through them like they're doing some kind of staccato mime routine.
Enemies sometimes lock into an animation and continue to go through the motions of attacking even after they've been killed and can't actually touch you.
Allied artificial intelligence is very screwy. Buddies with attacking abilities wander all over the place gooning packs of enemies best avoided. Even worse, friends without combat skills act as catnip for monsters. Whenever you're escorting some defenseless person to a quest, for instance, baddies often ignore you entirely and chase the helpless character all over the map. This forces you to in turn run them down in what plays out like an RPG take on an old Benny Hill sketch. Allies also often get mixed up with the scenery, and walk around with their lower bodies well below terra firma. Resolving most of these problems requires a save and reload, which is a pain because the game offers no save on demand.
Instead, you have to save and exit to the main menu, which can lose you some progress in the gameworld as you get knocked back to the last resurrection monument when you restart. None of the problems here is common enough to really destabilize the game, but there are so many different issues that you can never quite relax and assume that you won't encounter some quirk or crash that will set back your progress.
Even worse technical glitches also plague the game in its current state. Crashes drop the game to the desktop every so often. This typically takes place during transition loads when going from one area to another while playing solo.
Multiplayer is a little wonky online. It can be really tough to get connected, as the servers seem to fill up pretty quickly during prime hours in both Europe and North America. There are different servers for each region, although you still tend to have to wait until the wee hours of the morning to be sure you can get in a game. The game also has a tendency to reject legitimate user passwords, preventing you from logging in. These two problems might actually be related, as many posters at the official forum believe that the "password not found" error message pops up by mistake when the servers are full.
Holy crap @ all these issues.
That's quite ridiculous -- and this is a patched-up version of the game here in the NA, since this game's been out for a bit in Europe already and has those patches already behind it.
This game still sounds like it shouldn't have been released yet, in such a buggy state and all.
Although you've already seen just about everything that Sacred 2: Fallen Angel has to offer, the game is impressive enough that it seems more exciting and fresh than dull and familiar. It could use a patch to clean up some of the instability, and more efficient ways to move around the map, but this is still the best action-oriented RPG to come along since Titan Quest, and a truly addictive experience in its own right.
That's a hell of a statement, saying it's the best action-RPG since TQ -- especially despite it's huge amount of issues.
But, God -- just looking at the listed number of bugs, CTD's, graphical problems, issues, and other stuff -- I think I will wait a good while until more patches are behind it, the price drops, and when DRM is loosened-up a bit.
