A demon unleashed. Evil factions draw near. A kingdom under threat. And you are thrown right in the middle to fix it all. Welcome to Sacred. Choose from eight characters to roam the world of Ancaria. Have fun beating up loads of enemies, while helping a sheep get back home and gearing up your character for bigger better fights.

Release Date

October 2004.

Pros

There is a very good tutorial. Text boxes pop up when you reach certain areas and explain how to play the game. For veterans, they can be skipped totally as well.

There are plenty of animals walking around. People go around doing their own thing. Although they may not have any purpose in life, it does make the world feel alive. Oblivion had animals and people roaming around as well, but I did not find the game as alive as Sacred.

The graphics and animations are not as smooth as Torchlight, but does look nicer in my opinion. The game is very detailed with landscapes of all sorts, different buildings, caves that you can enter , different interactable items, arrows sticking out of monsters and much more. For the gore conscious, please note that the details also show dismemberment, blood flowing from the dead and exploding bodies.

There are loads of side quests which you can choose to complete or ignore. So far I have found the many side quests more interesting than the main campaign quest, even though some of them are a bit silly. There are no puzzle type quests, so some RPG players may not enjoy this aspect.

There are tons of items to loot and great crafting options.

When the music does play, it sounds good. It does not play enough though.

The world is quite open and very large. The roaming restriction by nature’s barriers may be by design, but the world still allows for significant free roaming. If you roam too far though, you might encounter opponents that will smack you back to town.

Unlike Torchlight and Marvel Heroes, you can actually save and load your game manually. So, save before trying something crazy. Have multiple saves to try different things and reload if you cannot bear to die and lose gold.

There are eight characters to choose from. That is five more than Torchlight, but obviously a lot less than Marvel Heroes. Having played the Wood Elf and the Daemon, I would say that the different characters are quite different. Each has their own skills and abilities, and have their own specialist equipment.

The AI is good and varied. Some enemies will run away, while others fight to the death. Some of your allies can and will fight with you and they actually help, while others will always run away. Overall, the different NPCs react differently and in my opinion react quite well for what they are.

Sacred is not the first game with horses, but it is the first game I have played that has horse charge! Use your horse to run into enemies to damage them and knock them over.

The speech, although limited, does sound good. Not as good as the likes of Marvel Heroes, but much better than that of Torchlight.

The sounds are also good. Weapon strikes. Spell casting. The death cries of goblins. Mooing cows. They all sound good. Unfortunately, Sacred cannot detect surround sound with the Logitech G35.

Spell/Special Combos! I have never seen this in any other RPG. You can create combos to cast/use spells/specials automatically in order with one mouse click. It is like creating macros to cast all your favourite spells in one go, or crafting a special whacking sequence. It is not for free though as you need gold to build the combos and you have to wait quite a long time after each use.

One very handy feature in Sacred is the auto-collect. Just press ‘a’ and your character will run around picking up loot. It sure beats clicking on every item. It is also configurable to pick up everything, just gold and unique items, or just gold.

There be dragons! They are not just small type dragons like the dragonkin of Torchlight. We are talking big fire breathing dragons that will roast you in seconds if you are not prepared. This came as a refreshing surprise as I cannot remember the last time I saw a dragon in an RPG.

Cons

The user interface is not as good as Torchlight and this does make Sacred a bit more difficult to play. The keys cannot be changed either.

It is a bit difficult to position the mouse cursor on an enemy to attack. Many times when I thought the cursor was over the enemy, it actually was not and my character was just running around rather than actually attacking.

The graphics resolution cannot be changed. It is fixed at 1024×768.

Riding horses is great, but there is one quite annoying bug. You can only mount a horse from the horses left. So if the horse is positioned with something in the way, you just cannot mount it. You then have to walk away far enough then call your horse again and hope it does not move to a place with more things in the way.

Other Points

Compared to Torchlight and Marvel Heroes, Sacred has less action. There is more going from place to place where there are only a few enemies to fight. This makes Sacred feel more like a traditional RPG rather than an action RPG. Do not let your guard down too much though, as there are areas with plenty of enemies to beat up.

There is good information that must be collected. They do help with the game, but it also means there is a lot of reading involved.

If you die, you will respawn at the last check point and lose some gold. This is not that big a deal as you can save your game at any time and reload it.

The Gold edition of Sacred comes with the extra Underworld campaign. I have not tried out the extra campaign though.

There is a day/night cycle, but other than changing the cosmetic lighting, it does not seem to do anything else. I have not played using the Vampiress character, but the manual does mention about suffering damage during daytime.

There is some light humour in the game.

Biases

Reviewed Sacred Gold version 2.28 of the game.

I have been playing using the Daemon and Wood Elf characters.

I really enjoyed Torchlight and Marvel Heroes.

I also really enjoyed Oblivion.

I have only played the single player main campaign and I am far from completing it. According to the game stats, I have only explored 2.25% of the world.

DRM

Sacred is available DRM free from GOG.com

Minimum Requirements (as stated on GOG.com)

Windows XP or Windows Vista
1 GHz Processor (1.4 GHz recommended)
512MB RAM (1 GB recommended)
3D graphics card compatible with DirectX 7 (compatible with DirectX 9 recommended)
Mouse, Keyboard
Compatibility notice: This game is NOT compatible with Intel integrated graphics cards.

Computer Played On

Windows 7 64 bit.
Intel Core i5 2.3GHz
4GB RAM
NVIDIA GeForce GT 525M 1GB RAM
Conexant SmartAudio with egg speakers or earphones. Or Logitech G35.
Graphics settings are set to whatever I feel comfortable with playing on this PC. They are usually not set to the highest settings. All screenshots are taken with my settings.