Reviewed by: BobiRoka
Developer: Ascaron
Publisher: KOCH Media

“When is an RPG not an RPG?”

“When it’s Diablo.”

What I’m getting at here is the hazy distinction between two diametrically opposed genres that seem to be lazily confused into one. A role-playing game, by its very definition, should revolve around the development of a ‘character’, rather than an animated collection of combat moves and/or magic spells. Diablo was born out of a desire to make RPGs a form of online entertainment, and so all the long-winded drama that caused Gary Gyrax (D&D creator) to stop playing with toy soldiers in the first place was brutally axed.

Diablo is not an RPG. Therefore, Sacred cannot be an RPG.

At this point, your first thought might be that the game in question here is a Diablo clone. The screenshots presented here will also back up that suspicion. Well, have 200 experience points, because you’re right, only this time it’s with horses! Dungeon Siege might have given us the pack mule, but Sacred actually allows player avatars to have four legged steeds to ferry them across the monster-infested land of Ancaria.

And when I say infested, I’m talking ‘crammed to the swollen eyeballs’ with adversaries. While the game is elegantly arranged into chapters, quests and sub quests spiraling off from ‘hub’ locations (i.e. castle/town/fort etc), you only have to walk your avatar in any direction for about 10 seconds before the next randomly generated mob is running at you with weapons drawn. Reason to have a horse number one: “To bypass numerous encounters you will have had many times before to get from location A to location B”.

There’s a problem with this philosophy, however. Sacred is a combat driven game. From the huge complement of different weapon types, to the combat arts and combos, this game is all about hacking, slashing and dicing away at a huge number of enemies, over and over again. There are six character classes to choose from, each with their own pre-set personalities and skill/magic lists. No artful mutliclassing here. 2 varieties of Elf are on offer, as are a human fighter and mage. The line up is completed by the infinitely more inspired Seraphim (see angelic celestial type) and Vampiress (capable of transforming into an alternate and more beastly form, at night). I played through as Gladiator (human fighter type), but from an adversarial standpoint, I can safely say that only the mage option appears to offer any proper diversity from the frantic mouse-button bashing gameplay typical of this ‘genre’. Sacred does have a twist however…

From my understanding of Diablo (I never played it), the left mouse button triggered your primary attack, while the right was reserved for a particular ‘special attack’ which used up a set amount of mana. Sacred expands upon this idea by giving players the ability to combine various learned ‘special attacks’ into combo moves. Triggering such a combo unleashes a series of devastating attacks upon your unwitting foe(s), but the longer the chain of moves the slower these combos are to ‘recharge’. The extensive skill-based leveling up tree allows you to improve this recharge rate, offering the possibility for more or less combo orientated playing styles. I guarantee it’s an area of the game that most players will exploit however, since it really is the crux of what makes the game more appealing than it ought to be.

On the subject of feathers to it’s hat, Sacred might not really go in for polygons (characters are modeled in 3D, backgrounds are pre-rendered), but you can’t fail to be impressed by the scale of the gameworld itself. If you printed out A4 screenshots of every ‘screensworth’ in the game, you could probably cover the Houses of Parliament. Interiors and exteriors are both equally well detailed – though intensive ‘tiling’ does become apparent sometimes when zoomed out – and with zero load times too. As with Dungeon Siege before it, there’s something to be said for games that don’t break themselves up with tedious suspension-of-disbelief-destroying loading pauses. Despite the pre-rendered backdrops, it’s possible to zoom the isometric view through 3 levels of elevation, but given the proximity of bad guys at all times, playing from a zoomed in perspective can prove fatal in all but the most confined interiors. I only bothered zooming in at all to take screenshots of the killer deathblows. It seems that Ascaron have got some clever resolution shifting wizardry going on here, since you are forced to play in one ambiguous screen mode. This obviously restricts scalability, and even on my machine there were some moments of slow-down in the busier battles.

Anyway, time to get back to that crucial selling point again, and possibly my biggest gripe with the game. Player mounts are the biggest thing I’ve been missing from single player RPGs of late. Their inclusion opens up the possibility of much larger scale conflicts than we’ve ever witnessed, yet Sacred’s attempt to bring that to us seems half-baked at the very least. To put it bluntly, horses seem to get in the way. Very few combat moves can be pulled off whilst on horseback and the few that do require your avatar to faff about lining himself up whilst enemies pile in. You do get access to a reasonably powerful area effect charge attack whilst horse bound, but it really can’t compare with your character’s own combat arts and combos. Like I said earlier, the one thing they’re good for is running away, but even then it feels like you’re breaking the game as vast mobs give chase only to disappear as soon as you get to a ‘hub’ location. Other balancing issues stick out, such as the severe lack of healing potions (criminal considering the ‘drink health potion’ action is bound to the space bar by default!) and the way in which cash is handed out. Believe me, after 10 levels of slaughter you won’t have trouble affording any item in the game. No doubt elements like this will be given proper attention in a patch (currently in the works), and who knows, they might even make the horses useful.

I can’t punish Sacred for not being everything I want in an RPG. It was written for a very specific audience within a fairly tight budget (If the narration and NPC interaction is anything to go by). Aside from a few balancing issues it’s a solid and engaging action adventure with an admirable feature list. It’s no KotOR, but if the Diablo fans are lapping Sacred up, it surely MUST be worth a look…

Presentation	8
Excellent attention to detail, cool and amusing character animations, special mention going to some of the more elaborate special attacks
Gameplay	7
Uninterrupted and relentless hack & slash mayhem compromised by balancing issues and an inevitable level of repetition.
Value	8
After 20 hours I had explored about 8% of the gameworld. Add to that a well-supported multiplayer mode and you’ve got as many potential gaming hours as Diablo – at the very least. New turf doesn’t always equate to genuinely new encounters though…
Benchmark	6
Horses and attack combos are about as far as innovation gets, and both elements conflict with each other too much to be properly exploited. A noble effort, but sadly not enough to threaten the heavyweights…
Score	7
After some patching this might be worth an 8, but as it is there’s not enough here to keep this particular RPG fan interested…