Sacred 3

There's fun to be had in the hectic brawls the game throws you into, but what else is there? Some pleasant changes of scenery? I genuinely had fun at the game's outset, but Sacred 3 failed to entice me into coming back. There was potential, but it was fumbled at almost every turn.

Bawdy boredom.

It’s spectacularly bad. Bad not like Sacred games have been bad before, where maps stopped working or the game just crashed. In this game crashing would be a welcome feature. Here the awfulness is hard-programmed into the code, wilful, deliberate. It’s a series of abysmal choices strung together in a vacuous, tiresome chain of near-identical linear missions. The "combat arts" should have been its defining feature, letting you craft a unique and elaborate fighting style to afford this drivel at least the genre of "hack n slash". But instead it's the rusting chassis of an ARPG, after it's been s...

An enjoyable if not overly ambitious take on the hack and slash genre, Sacred 3 combines humour and robust co-operative gameplay to create an enjoyable game in its own right.

As one of four improbably powerful heroes — Marak, a hulking warrior who wields a giant hammer and fire magic; Claire, a winged paladin with air-based spells who swings her sword in wide arcs; Alithea, a quick fighter with a spear and earth-based abilities; and Vajra, who can unleash ice spells in addition to a constant stream of arrows – your job is to defeat the monstrous armies of an evil warlord named Zane, who's trying to conquer the land of Ancaria. Most of this boils down to hammering a single button to slash at gremlins, zombies, and orc-like grimmocs, which is satisfying enough. Addit...

Sacred 2: Fallen Angel, while not what you’d call a big success, still managed to garner quite a following among a certain set of gamers, even in spite of a few rough edges. Those that did end up sinking hour after hour into the action role playing game really appreciated its massive open world, extensive loot system, and huge number of quests. Therefore, with the release of Sacred 3, there’s prime opportunity for publisher Deep Silver to build on the foundation laid by the earlier titles, even if original developer Ascaron Entertainment is firmly out of the picture.

Deeper combat and customization could have gone a long way in making Sacred 3 a great game. Instead, it's a game with a lot to do, with little reason to do it.

As for the audio and narrative in Sacred 3, the game takes a major step back. Though music and sound effects are fine, the voicework is atrocious and stems from some really poor writing. Instead of adopting a serious tone or one that is lightly traced with occasional moments of humour, Sacred 3 goes all out, cramming the game with flat puns wherever it can. There’s one character in particular, Aria, who will crack a bad joke only to apologise for it seconds later. Every single time. Dialogue is also peppered with words and exclamations like “noob”, “overkill”, and “sexy”.

With a pair of well-regarded titles already in existence, both firmly planted in the action-RPG genre, Sacred 3 had what amounted to a built in audience on which to unleash the game. Yet it does not take long playing the game to determine that Deep Silver and Keen Games have let down the series' existing audience and are unlikely to garner very many new fans either. The bottom line is that simply calling a game "Sacred" doesn't mean it that it actually is Sacred.

Sacred 3 has been in development for four years, we’re told, but it really doesn’t show. In order to fix issues with the previous titles, the development team have simplified the game by removing pretty much everything that isn’t absolutely essential, before throwing in a puerile script that does nothing but annoy. There’s potential here that just isn’t ever realised, even if the game can be fun in small doses.

Nope. Just nope. Go elsewhere. Sacred 3 offers nothing worth seeing.

While we’re certainly not starving for Action RPGs these days Sacred 3 does manage to stand out. A poorly-told story with odious voice-acting, crushing linearity, a total lack of customization right down to clothing and levelling upgrades, and an absolute distain for single-player gamers are its biggest faults. None of these manage to stop it from being a really fun and well designed ARPG, which is addictive with one player and utterly glorious in co-op. The linearity and other lack of reas...