Sacred Gold

Sacred Gold collects together the original Sacred, Sacred Plus (containing a couple of new regions, monsters, items) and Sacred Underworld (Mods to the original campaign to incorporate the two new characters and a completely new region). Released a while after the seminal Diablo II it came at a time when it appeared that all we had was the Diablo series for our hacking and slashing needs. Sacred offered a pleasant change. The basics are pretty much the same as Diablo. Left click on an enemy to attack, right click to use a skill then sweep up all the loot. The main differences come from the skill and leveling system. Unlike Diablo skill tree, where all combat skills are tied to levels (get skill A at level 1, Skill B at level 5 and so on) here you find the combat skills on champion monsters and in chests. So before you've reached a couple of levels you can have an almost complete set of skills. BUT take a skill to far to fast and the regen time of the skill will make it to cost prohibative. Instead you need to balance this with creative uses of the skills and levels. As you gain levels you can increase selective stats and add passive skills to your characters. Through the correct tweaking of these stats and certain skills you can reduce the regen time of a combat skill to less than the duration, making your character a walking tank. Don't think this makes the game easy. You will be fighting large amounts of monsters on the screen at any one time and, unless you are playing on the easiest of settings, the monsters will generally stay ahead of you on the difficulty curve. The game is massive. It is possible that it could even rival the likes of Oblivion for the size of the playing field. Also around 80% of this world is available to you from the beginning of the game and tons of quests for you to do during this time. There are Dragons tucked away in obscure areas, Skeletons (who sometimes keep coming back) in desert areas and lush rural areas inhabited by orcs and goblins. Unfortunately there are a couple of problems. The version on offer here (as well as on a rival system) does not allow you to change the resolution. It appears to be fixed at 1024x768. Now I am running this on a machine capable of running GTA IV with all settings set to medium/high at 1280x1024, you would think that an increased resolution would be possible. A slightly bigger problem is that the quest system is quite buggy. Sometimes you will not get a compass pointer to indicate where to go for a quest, making it necessary to flit between the map and the game world constantly. Othere quests do not register on the map either making them impossible to complete. These aren't game breakers, especially as some of the quests are so mundane (more on this in a second) but it can be irritating as they can be a good source of loot and XP. Finally there are the quests themselves. There is a main story quest which is pretty dull and just an excuse to make sure you move from one area to the other. But that isn't the big problem. Instead it is the side quests. There are somewhere in the region of 300+ side quests. Unfortunately more than a few of them are of the mind numbingly dull variety. Example "My Sister is a bit old and tends to be forgetful, can you go look for her" or "I need you to go and fetch my Fishing Partner". Quests so insignificant you wonder why they are there. But even with these niggles I would highly recommend this game, especially if you are looking for something to do until Diablo III is released.

If you're looking for a massive, open-ended RPG that you can play casually with your friends over LAN, Sacred is that game. I tried many different avenues before purchasing Sacred from GOG. Most RPG's are pretty limited in how you can use LANs for some reason. In some cases you can only play on a portion of the game world and some don't let you use a LAN altogether, forcing you to play online. Unfortunately, for my friends and me, this wasn't really an option. Some of my friends either don't have an internet connection or don't own a decent computer of their own. Playing a MMORPG with absolute strangers also wasn't something that sounded appealing. Regardless of how much time you put into those games, there is always going to be more powerful characters than you. Sacred ended up being the solution I was searching for - a RPG that I can casually enjoy with my friends. Let me move on by actually reviewing the game by listing the games pros and cons. Pros - Excellent visuals despite its age. Sacred has very sharp visuals. You play from an isometric perspective similar to Diablo. However, Sacred's images are much sharper than Diablo 2's were and it also gives you the freedom to zoom in and out to a limited degree. You can actually view a pretty decent area of the map fully zoomed out, but this can sometimes cause even more powerful computers to chug a little. - Massive open-world map. The map in Sacred is huge. You will spend an awful lot of time exploring the world that has been created for you and uncovering all of its little nooks and crannies. Sacred populates this world with many different enemies, towns, and tons and tons of quests. - Limitless replayability. I have read other reviews saying that it doesn't contain much replayability and I must say that I disagree completely. To me, playing a game like this is all about building up your character that is exactly where Sacred excels. There is tons of loot to be discovered (not to mention tons of inventory space). The game itself is quite lengthy, but you will be rewarded with better loot by playing it again on higher levels of difficulty. On top of that, you will find plenty of items that only work with certain character classes. Fortunately, you can store the items you can't use in your chest, start a new character of the different class, and he or she can use the items your other character discovered. This gives your new character a bit of an advantage early on and gives you incentive to try out the world again. You can also import and export your character between single-player, multi-player, and between Sacred original or its expansion, providing you with flexiblity to work on his or her stats whenever, whether with friends or by yourself. - Smooth interface. Once you get used to playing the game, you'll find it's a breeze to use. The interface isn't quite as clean and easy as Diablo's, but it still works quite well. Spacebar will replenish your health by using potions when you get into the really hairy battles, you can easily map a special attack to your mouse, and the tried and true hack and slash combat is a joy. It's not quite as gelatinizing as Dungeon Siege, where you can basically set your character to auto-pilot as you traverse the world, but it's close. Cons - Story? Sacred contains a story somewhere, but I have no idea what it is. However, Sacred is one of the few games that can get away without much of a story because it's not about story, it's about questing and building up your character. - Landscape blockage - You'll encounter places that are difficult to traverse. You will find yourself in a situation similar to this quite often: I want to go from town A on one side of the river to town B on the other side of the river - there has to be a bridge near here, nope; well maybe down here, nope; I can't believe I have to walk all the way over there to get to where I want to go! There are frustrating little blockages like this all over the world, and it can be especially frustrating since the map is so large and you won't know the right paths until you've actually uncovered the entire territory. This leads to all sorts of back-tracking and unneccessary monster slaying of respawning enemies. - Auto-leveling and level-scaling. In a lot of ways, this game can more easily be compared to Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion than it can be to Diablo. Both feature wide-open worlds, which is a great feature, however both also contain annoying leveling practices. In Sacred, your character basically has his skill points alloted for him automatically whenever you level up. You will find yourself getting stronger, but will notice every time you level up you only get to allot one skill point - this is because the game automatically allocates the other skill points. What this does for you is prevents you from screwing up your character by neglecting any particular skill, but it also eliminates a lot of freedom of skill customization. You'll never be able to wield magic as a barbarian, so get that thought out of your mind. If you want to do that, you'll need to create a new character from scratch. Sacred also contains an annoying little aspect also found in Oblivion - level-scaling. The enemies strength in any given area will be tied to your character's strength. That's not necessarily to say the world will be as powerful as you are like throughout Oblivion, but it is disconcerting to an extent. Not only that, but if you return to an area containing weaker creatures, you will be given a nearly miniscule amount of experience for killing them, while a weaker character will receive much more. This is frustrating if you're playing with someone new, who is trying to catch up to where you are in the game, and you're killing little minions to keep him safe but receiving approximately 1/50th the amount of experience he is for each kill. You already need to gain tons more experience than he does for each level you gain, what's the point of the game reducing enemies experience value to values that will never, ever result in a level increase for you? I've heard the game also contains some bugs, but I've never encountered any in my time of playing. If you're looking for a game with lots of action that also contains deep story for a single-player experience, you may want to look somewhere else - I would recommend Divine Divinity in that situation - Divine Divinity also gives you absolute skill customization if you're looking for that and can be found on GOG. However, if you're looking for a character-building game, filled with all sorts of distinct weapon and armor types, that you can casually play with your friends over LAN and that will keep you occupied seemingly for an eternity, look no further than Sacred.

I do not yet own the GoG version of this game, but I have the most recent patches for the original CD version. For a Diablo II clone, this game is alot of fun. Like Diablo, you get to choose between a few archtypical characters (melee character, magic user, etc) and will spend most of the game hammering the mouse button. But it's more open than DII and it 'feels' like you have more control over the game. The graphics are clean and pretty; as you walk from forest to desert, to snowy moutaintops, the transitions are very natural, making the game feel more like a world than a series of levels. Horses are nice too. Unfortunetely, what could have been a very spiffy title is marred by some serious issues. In particular is the unbalanced difficulty of the game; one minute you're slashing through enemies by the thousands with no problem, the next your getting knocked around like a lightweight and porting back to town every three minutes for more potions. The problem is more serious with melee characters than magic users; towards the end of the game, my warrior got to a point where I basically couldn't progress any further in single player. It's possible that that had something to do with how I built the character, since the stats on equipment are difficult to understand. When the game was first released, it was BUGGY. Most of the most offensive game-breakers have been fixed in patches, but it still has it's share of issues (my favorite causes the character to stand up and ride his horse like a surfboard). Ditto on the balance issues; it's been leveled out a bit since release, so if you played it when it came out it might be worth another shot, but the problems do persists even now. Still, if you likes you some Diablo-esque action, for ten bucks it's definetly worth a spin. Not terrible at all, despite it's drawbacks, and you'll probably get plenty of fun out of it. Alot better than it's recently released, dismally bad sequel too.

Before I start let me say, this is a nostalgia free review since I just started playing the game. I have played many games of this genre and all suffer from the same mistakes. Uninteresting map design boring story, boring characters, boring loot, boring class system, boring leveling system etc etc etc etc.. sacred has non of those things. Secred is not like any other. Its open world, I am not just hunting quests for exp. I want to explore the world and read the side quests, the reasons I am hunting something and enjoy the lore the creators made. The graphics are just amazing and will never get old. The scenery is stunning, it makes me feel peaceful I don't know why. My favorite thing here is grinding. I love slaying anything in my way, you don't need to grind because this game is designed perfectly so you go to point a to point b and you have already the strength to beat the following quest, but I just like doing side quest while exploring and grind runes for my characters. The overall gameplay is just different than anything else, the way you enchant and level up your special moves or whatever their are called. Its not just level up> level up skills> repeat. It is a cycle yes, but a different and interesting one. You must play this game at least once, it deserves it