SACRED

GAME DETAILS :-

Developer : Ascaron

Publisher : Encore, Koch Media And Red Ant Enterprises

Engine : Not Revealed

Genre : Action Role-Playing

Release Date : March 25 , 2004

SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS :-

Operating System : Windows 2000 / Windows XP

CPU : AMD Athlon Thunderbird B-Models / Intel Pentium III Processor

Memory (RAM) : 256 MB

Graphics Hardware : DirectX 8.1 Compatible Video Card with Memory 32 MB

[NVIDIA : GeForce 4 Ti Series
ATI : Radeon 8500 Series]

Hard Disk Space : 2 GB

GAME FEATURES :-

Sacred is a great-looking, generally solid action role-playing game that provides a few interesting gameplay innovations. It features an open-ended gaming world to explore, decent cooperative and competitive multiplayer options, and a good mix of goal-oriented questing and fast-paced battles. The monsters are all classic fantasy stereotypes, such as undead, dragons, and ogres; you can use the Alt key to highlight and quickly locate the seemingly endless bounties of loot they hoard. There's a huge variety of magical items, including sets of related items to collect, upgradable socketed items, and class-specific artifacts. You'll maintain a chest "stash" in towns, where you can store some of your accumulated swag, and you can hook up with companions who will provide some temporary assistance, though you don't directly control them. You can replay the storyline at progressively difficult skill levels. Those features make Sacred sound very similar to Diablo II, and in many ways it is, but Sacred also has its share of innovations. The auto-mapping function nicely complements the open-ended gaming world design by granting you a thorough overview of the areas you've explored. Sacred's interface includes convenient features, such as a circle around your character that graphically reveals current hit points, so you don't have to take your eyes off the action to steal glances at readouts further from the action. You can buy a horse to speed travel and garner an additional defensive bonus in combat, but it's difficult to effectively engage opponents from horseback, and characters lose access to several of their best character skills when riding. A couple of the character types are particularly novel, but there is a considerable overlap of special attack skills among characters. Characters have basic attributes, skills, and special attacks/spells.

Skills are passive traits that grant characters additional proficiency in certain actions such as horse riding. The skills are universally available to all characters. Improving special attacks will make them more powerful, but the improvements are largely statistical rather than visceral, and you won't be able to use upgraded abilities as frequently unless you also allocate points to related skills. Special attacks and spells aren't organized in skill trees with prerequisites, and you are never prevented from increasing those abilities, but that flexibility tends to just make characters less distinctive and ironically makes the game less replayable. There are no fewer than five different, unstackable potion types, but the more original potions tend to annoyingly clutter up your character's inventory more than they enhance gameplay. Gameplay is never as addictive or rewarding as it should be, since combat is the game's primary focus and it frequently becomes more of a tedious chore than a thrilling, fast-paced experience. Sacred has a comprehensive suite of multiplayer options, including an Internet-hosting service similar to Blizzard's Battle.net. You can team up with up to three other players to fight the game's main campaign, or you can fight in up to 16-player hack-and-slash duels. Sacred has a few minor bugs, such as broken subquests and placeholder dialogue text, but bugs tend to pop up more frequently in multiplayer games. Sacred is a welcome addition to the genre that distinguishes itself by incorporating a few novel gameplay tweaks. However, the game's success is ultimately limited by an unrewarding character development system and by combat that is too frequently tedious rather than engaging.

GAME REVIEW :-

7.5/10

Sacred Trailer :-