Sacred Review
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The soundtrack and voices are great. The score will add to the epic feel of the game. Rousing and then calm, exciting and then refreshing, it will follow your character's exploits in a cinematic fashion. The sounds of the game are bright and clear, and the voice acting is on par with the graphics and score. You will catch your character spouting out lines on a regular basis. As with most games, some lines will be cheesy, some will be cool, and many will be memorable. Sacred takes place in a land called Ancaria. Ancaria is a huge world and the gameplay is very open-ended, meaning you can just wander freely and do quests, fight monsters, and collect and upgrade items to your heart's content. The settings are mostly non-interactive, aside from chests and the like, but the artwork and backgrounds are phenomenal. You will explore deserts, plains, cities, and wintry mountains, all beautifully rendered with exquisite detail. As you travel, the game map will update, lifting the fog of war to let you see how much of the world you have explored. You can look up the percentage of the world explored as well as tracking foes you have killed in your adventures.
As you roam from place to place, you will encounter set quests in certain areas, but you will also create randomly generated quests, many of which are repetitive. So after you clear an area of all the quests, you may return to find that new quests are available usually simple things like retrieving an item from a location, escorting a local to a new location, or killing something. And again, some of these quests will appear again in another location, so you might have to (escort the architect) or (retrieve the helmet) more than once in different locations.
The dungeons are small, and most of the game takes place in outdoor settings. Monsters respawn regularly, so an area you thought cleared will be repopulated when you pass through again. However, after you clear all the quests in a set of linked areas, the area is deemed (at peace,) and the respawn rates calm down. Monsters roam in huge numbers and in mindless fashion, some fighting other monsters, but all willing to turn their attention to you. They are the standard fare of undead, orcs, and ogres, some dragons, and a few bosses of a more unique nature.
The main plot itself is nothing groundbreaking: stop the evil wizard and save the world. But no matter how much ground you have covered as you work your way through, you will be stunned to discover how little of the world you have covered. It is HUGE. There are about a dozen teleportation portals you can use, but there is a lot of legwork if you want to conquer Ancaria.
Quests are not only logged in your journal, but you also have an indicator arrow at the bottom of your screen that always points to where you have to go next for the quest. You don't have to think or remember details you can just follow these arrows, kill foes, and pick up items. The game even indicates whom you should talk to by hovering an exclamation point over them, and using colored dots on the game map, shows you where quests are to be completed and where key characters are located. In essence, you travel from place to place, quest-to-quest, retrieving items and killing enemies until you are done with the game.
Just for laughs, there are tons of hidden treasure stashes, a few pop culture references, and some Easter eggs to be discovered, but I'm not going to give away any of the details here.
The game is more action than role-playing, the focus being on hacking-and-slashing as opposed to negotiating, interacting with NPCs, and problem solving. Your biggest problem to solve is going to be how to kill the next round of enemies.
