FutureFive New Zealand - Consumer technology news & reviews from the future
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Tue, 1st Sep 2009
FYI, this story is more than a year old

You know when a cool old television show that you absolutely loved gets a re-release on DVD and you excitedly buy   it, get it home, put it on and… it’s just not as good as you remembered? This is pretty much the experience I had with Sacred 2: Fallen Angel.

This is a dungeon-crawler in the truest sense of the word and it wears this badge with honour. Your quests may be  flimsily veiled by story and plot, but strip it back and this game is an exercise in hoarding and leveling up. There’s a  multitude of loot to pilfer from the corpses of the vanquished, and this loot can be sold, scrapped or modified. Such modification also extends to your character, with the RPG standard of stat point allocation and combat and spell  upgrades. As with the original Sacred title, mounts become available fairly early in the game. These mounts can boost  some combat skills whilst hindering others, and they also act as additional inventory real estate.

Sacred 2 features the usual cliché character types to choose from: there’s the dumb bellend warrior, the snooty-tooty  aristocratic elf, the hooded mage with emphysema and the female cleric, dressed like a pole-dancer and talking 100% valley-girl. A notable exception to the tired and true – sorry tried and true – is the Temple Guardian: a cybernetic  man-dog with a laser for a hand and a weird walk. No surprises which character I went with…

Aesthetically, the game is a mixed bag. The environments are massive, no doubt, but things can get a little laggy, and  ugly ‘pop-ups’ are a frequent occurrence, particularly when teleporting to a new location.

Sacred 2: Fallen Angel is  what it is, and depending on your point of view this is either a good or a bad thing. For me the obvious comparisons to  the likes of Diablo and Baldur’s Gate are unavoidable: games which have done it better and perhaps more importantly,  did it a long time ago.