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Sacred 2 by Mischief Maker 07/23/2014, 6:50pm PDT Sacred 3 came out recently and I was sorely disappointed to learn that it's some kind of latter-day Golden Axe. Because last year I picked up Sacred 2 Gold on sale as an impulse buy and it turned out to be the greatest action RPG I've ever played, beating out Diablo 2, Torchlight, and even the original Sacred. Part of the secret of Sacred 2's success is its mechanics. There's no MP in this game, just recharge times. What's more, the spell tree is flat. All you have to do is "eat" a single level of a skill (picked up as a random drop) and you've got it. Whereas in a game like Diablo 2 I have to hold off on buying skeleton summoning because I'll be fucked long term and just autoattack until I hit level 30 or something, in Sacred 2 there's no waiting for the one day you'll unlock the skill combination your build is supposed to emphasize. Go to town on kobolds with the lightning/fireball/sword combo from the very start. Boring old autoattacks only really come into play if you didn't balance the power of your spells to their regeneration time. This is not to say that Sacred 2 doesn't dangle carrots for you to reach. All those skills you pick up have a branching selection of modifiers you can unlock with the correct skill points, like adding life leech to your power swing, or adding a chance to reflect attacks to your dragon form. After that there are mastery bonuses for boosting secondary skills to 75, and so on. It is highly recommended that you spend some quality time with the Sacred 2 Wiki because the variety of character builds is dizzying. Another part of what makes the game great is that it was developed concurrently for consoles, so the interface is incredibly painless. Travel with WASD instead of point and hold. Press "Q" and a circle appears around you that shlorps up any items within its radius. The world is littered with revival obelisks that double as fast-travel teleporters. Which brings me to the other great thing about Sacred 2... But the thing that most makes Sacred 2 a winner is that it takes place in a beautiful, colorful world comparable in size to an Elder Scrolls game (albeit sans skybox). It's a prequel to the ho-hum samurai Tolkien Sacred 1, and takes place during the fall of the golden age of the Elves. The world is best described as Imperial Rome with a scattering of ancient Stargate tech (hell, one of the player classes is an ancient anubis robot). It's a visually appealing world to look at, and it's fun to explore and discover the weird architecture and sci fi ruins the developers came up with. And unlike professional reviewers the world over, my soul is not hurt by a game suggesting there's something appealing about sexualized females, so I love the fact that the "Paladin" character is a cyborg supermodel with mechanical wings protruding from her back whose armor gets skimpier and skimpier the higher level it gets. Meanwhile the evil character, the inquisitor, looks like Emperor Palpatine, shoots blue lightning, and can summon Diablo at will, (literally! He summon' Sacred 1's final boss as his minion). Between the appealing world and the complex character builds, you could easily lose a life in this game. On the downside, the game was buggy as shit when first released, and official patches didn't catch them all in this game of Elder Scrolls scope. The community patch is mandatory. While the Shadow Knight has one of the best voice actors this side of Eldred from Sacred, pretty much the entire remaining cast of voice actors are terrible. This game uses the Wizardry 8 system of level scaling, wherein every enemy is within a level or two of you, but different regions have their own level floors and ceilings, so eventually you'll be so strong enemies in the starting area don't even bother fucking with you, and if you make a beeline for the lategame areas you will be stomped. But other than that, Sacred 2 is THE most fun action RPG I've played this side of Drox Operative and I can't recommend it highly enough. Don't just take my word for it!

Sacred 2 by Mischief Maker 07/23/2014, 6:50pm PDT