Sacred 2: Remaster Review on Xbox

Sacred 2: Remaster is an isometric action RPG, that brings back to life a fan-favourite.

The premise is you play as one of seven heroes who step into the world of Ancaria.

The game boasts hi-res textures, better combat and bugfixes, modern UI and full controller support, which includes all expansions and updates in one definitive edition and 3 difficulty settings with more unlocked once completed.

Accessibility

With regards to accessibility, there is a limited number of options available fixed only. These range from camera zoom, auto collect, auto potion, and potion order. For audio, there are a number of options for voice, menu and overall sound effects. There is no button remapping or subtitle options. So those with visual and motor issues, you may struggle with the game.

Gameplay

Remasters are becoming more and more a thing, with many wanting to relive days of old, where the ‘’modern audience’’ version of gaming has yet to be infiltrated. So it did pique my interest when the developer announced they would be doing a remaster of a game I’ve heard mentioned quite a lot by ARRG enthusiasts. This game came out in the lofty days of 2008 where content and gameplay was king, and silliness and sensibilities were less restrictive.  So, with nostalgia in my heart, I jumped in to see what all the fuss is about.

The game starts in a world of Ancaria, where a mysterious substance known as T-Energy is discovered. What starts of as a good thing, soon goes very wrong when Elves start exploiting it and it slowly corrupts the world in the process. From the start screen you are given a wide range of character classes to choose from. They are Seraphim, Dryad, Shadow Warrior, Inquisitor, High Elf, Temple Guardian, or Dragon Mage. Every class has their own stats, style of play, and unique skill trees for you to enjoy. A number of them can be customized from the usual sex, hair, skin colour, and voice etc.

Next you are allowed to pick a imp, a walking mobile storage, whom you can call upon at anytime. From there its time to pick whether you wish to fight for the forces of good or evil, which does impact the story somewhat and also your next choice. Which is what deity you wish to be protected under, and their special skill you want to inherit. But as mentioned, depending on if you chose good or evil, some will be locked away from you. Then it’s time for you to start your game, and depending on the class you chose, you will start off in a different location on the world map.

And oh boy is the world map big…think skyrim big, but in a isometric view. And you will be exploring all of it, any way you wish. The world does have fast travel in all main towns, but also dotted around there is resurrection stones, to respawn you once you die. However, be aware that it’s the last one you activate which is the one you will respawn at, so if you haven’t turned one on locally, expect a long walk back!

There is a tutorial area, with a variety of quests to help you understand the basics, but these are fully optional, with the game allowing you to go anywhere your heart desires. The game has a massive amount of stuff to do across Ancaria, with its many varied locations, and six hundred plus of side quests to keep you busy. And don’t be thinking these side quests are quick, some of these can take an hour or so to complete due to their locations or quests being multilayered. This is game was built to suck you in and keep you there for hundreds of hours, which it really does.

One quest had me taking a suicidal young lady to die next to her dead lover, who when we got to his tomb, was actually a zombie. There love was still shining bright, but he couldn’t leave as a demon was keeping him prisoner. So without a do, we fought to the demon, who gave me a choice: kill them and get a nice reward or try and kill him so they could stay together, a zombie and wife duo that would have serious ramifications to the local towns inhabitants. I chose the reward.

Speaking of rewards, the games levelling system is much more complicated than your average rpg. There is the usual attributes such as Strength, Dexterity, Intelligence, Constitution, Vitality, and Stamina to deal with. Besides progressing these attributes, you all get to unlock ten passive skills from a selection of 29, at various progression levels. But be careful of your choice as there is NO re-spec in this game and you will need to restart with a new character to choose other passives and combat arts!

Another aspect is your character is capable of carrying weapons and shields, wearing various pieces of armour and also can wear certain jewellery, such as amulets and rings, with gems being added to buff them when the blacksmith becomes available. Similar to other RPG’s you say, that’s true, but here every one of those elements is all based around a positive and negative system. Each element has a number of stats, that will have positive and negative statuses. These effects can have big influences on your characters combat, a lot more than the usual levelling system. For example, a helmet could have a huge buff in damage to one of your combat arts but equally have a huge cooldown preventing it from being used often.

Combat arts are 3 skill trees that each have about 5 skills that can be unlocked as you make your way through the game, these can then be further augmented to have different effects or stats. Nothing too unfamiliar right, well you can also combine these skills to provide unique attack combinations which you can then slot in one of 4 slots as automated attacks. You don’t have to combine them, you could just slot 4 skills if you wanted, but combinations do provide more damage and better outputs when against certain enemies. These are automated to go off once you have pressed the X button and will even auto path to the next enemy if you don’t do anything.

Combat in general is probably the weakest part of the game, with A being your standard default attack, with LT is for switching between four weapon slots. RT is used to switch between combat arts, and X to use them. Whilst your D-pad is used for potions, special skill and battle stance buffs. Attacking is locking onto a target and using your default standard attack with intermittent combat art to really take the enemies down quicker. The combat pacing is also a bit too slow for me, and it being sped up would be ideal for a patch. 

One thing you will notice is that if left idle even for a couple of seconds your character will attempt to attack the nearest enemy with your combat art. Great to ensure you get more experience, not so great when you are in the middle of your inventory switching gear, and you protagonist runs off to challenge 10 imps all on his own, with you panicking to finishing changing gear before you die….

There is a huge amount of content here that I haven’t got into, such as mounts that also buff you and allows mounted combat, vast collection of builds, dlc that only pc got, which is now part of the game and a plethora loot and side quests to keep you entertained for hours.

Graphics

The games developers have gone out of their way to ensure that the graphically fidelity is kept as close to the original as possible, and for me I would say it looks like a higher textured version of Sacred 2: Gold edition. This means that those early 2000’s character models are kept in all their chonky goodness, but with much sharper visuals.

The large number of environments are colourful, vibrant, and fun to explore, and being old school, every building can actually be entered! So towns actually do feel like towns, and the resident NPC’s in them do have their own lives. Following some of the locals as they do their busywork was a joy to behold and something even more modern days rpg’s struggle to do. It’s clear the fidelity to textures, character models, and the world in general has had a lot of attention done to it. And thanks to a decent camera system that actually allows you to zoom in from a high-level isometric to an almost 3rd person view, you can truly enjoy these higher textures in all their glory!!

The next big feature that has been tweaked is the games UI, and this has caused a lot of controversy. Old school fans still do like the original layouts and explanations, with newer fans preferring the changes. Because of this also, some of the tutorial explanations don’t really work anymore and some old school builds are nullified.

Whilst the game shows off its true old school silly fun, there is a large number of bugs currently as we speak that happened as I played. As I mentioned before, auto attack that can’t be turned off, some missing animations on minions, and swapping your inventory items to your personal chest isn’t quite working. But by far the worst for me, was your protagonist getting stuck in an animation and not moving till you reset your game. This happened a good 30 times whilst I was playing, and it whilst it wasn’t excessively frequent; it was enough to be annoying! Thankfully, I never had any crashes though. Another element is for some strange reason; is that co-op has been fully removed from the game which the xbox 2009 version still has and works even today??

What I will say is that though is there was no screen tearing, great draw distance and little to no pop-in and the 4k at 60fps is smooth as butter.

Sound

When it comes to the music, the game has kept to the original sounds in every aspect, just with a much crisper foundation. The game generally favours environmental sounds, that are there to enhance the combat. That said there is a small collection of orchestral, piano and harp-based scores when moving about in the background which then ramp up at boss encounters.

Battles and weapons and UI sounds are great and still have that deep authentic feel to them. Magic is especially good in conveying the outwardly powers hitting flesh. The game has a lot of voicework, from the main protagonists to wandering NPC’s each with funny and engaging dialogue. Every quest is only enhanced listening to the pure silliness on display and the way the game doesn’t take any topic too seriously.

My recommendation here would be a good quality soundbar to enjoy your characters 4th wall breaking comments and you explore this vast land.

Verdict

This leads me onto the rating of the game:-
Now I rate games in order of, avoid, on sale, great purchase and must own. My rating for Sacred 2: Remaster is a ‘’ on sale’’.

For those who are true new players only to the franchise, who only want a single player experience, this a is a great game to buy with the huge amount of content that is on offer. However, it does suffer from removed features, a huge number of bugs, that may very well put a lot of people off, until its patched correctly.

The game is currently priced on Xbox at £24.99 or approx. $30 and depending on skill and patience would give you about 60+hours to complete the story. However, this can be extended to well over 200 hours if you try to do all side quests and 100% completion, and that’s not including doing various other playthroughs with the different classes.

New players will have a great time with this if they can look past the bugs, but those that have the 2009 version or even this on pc, will be put off by the issues mentioned in the review. I really hope that the developers can turn this around and give this the treatment its fans are clearly desperate for.