Amazon.com: Sacred: Gold Edition: PC: Video Games

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4.0 out of 5 stars (40 customer reviews)

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72 of 73 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This game is a steal at this low price!, December 19, 2005

By	JBT (Reality, USA) - See all my reviews

Fun:5.0 out of 5 stars

Sacred Gold is a really great deal for the price. The Gold edition includes the original Sacred, the Plus patch/enhancement, and the Underworld expansion. Sacred is a game that is very similar to Diablo 2, so if you are a fan of the genre then this definitely a good buy.

I will spend most of the review comparing the game to Diablo 2 since most people have played that game and have an opinion of it.

Items:
There are just as many items in this game as there are in the Diablo games. There are regular, magic, rare, unique, set, and character specific items. Sacred also does a good job of balancing the drops in single player such that the majority of the character class drops will follow the current class you are playing. You don't have to worry too much about ending up with a lot of items that you cannot use.

Characters:
There are 8 different character classes. For those that are accustomed to the Diablo characters these new classes might seem strange at first. There is the dwarf, daemon, vampiress, seraphim, gladiator, dark elf, wood elf, and the battle mage.

Skills:
There is just as much a variety in skills as there are in Diablo 2 but the skill system is very different. You do not receive a skill point with each level up. You must find skill charms (as drops and quest rewards). Once you find a skill you can add it to your abilities.

At first I was skeptical as this pretty much means that you have to get lucky on a drop if you are looking for a particular skill to increase. Thankfully the game provides a merchant that will trade unwanted skill charms for the ones you are looking for at a trivial charge. Skill charms are easily found so you will never be in a situation where you are held back by not being able to increase a specific skill.

You may ask the question... Then why can't I beef up one particular skill and be a powerhouse from the onset of the game? Using a skill does not drain mana as in Diablo 2. When you use a skill in Sacred the use of skills is deactivated during a "cool down" period (in much the same way skills in Warcraft 3 operate except the cool down period applies across all skills). Increasing the level of a skill increases the length of the cool down period. Before increasing the skill level you must decide if the added effect/damage will offset the increased time it will take between casts.

Quests:
There are many, many quests in this game. There are the main quests that will progress you through the acts in the game and there are hundreds of secondary quests. The secondary quests usually consist of go fetch, deliver, kill x enemies, kill a certain enemy, escort, etc.

The secondary quests are mainly found in the small towns that are scattered all over the map. It is usually a good idea to travel around the whole town and accept all the secondary quests before starting out on the first one. This will cut down on a lot of back and forth as many of the secondary quests are often grouped together.

Other:
The area to travel is massive. You are provided a horse to help make travel go a little faster. You can fight on horseback and the horse has a skill that allows you to trample the enemies. This was a great touch. You will need the horse.

Graphics. The graphics are a bit better than Diablo 2 but they really didn't have to be. It looks as if the characters are 3 dimensional. It really adds to the graphics requirement and I get a bit of stutter from time to time.

One thing that gets a bit annoying is the enemy respawn rate. If you clear an area you will find it overridden with enemies again upon return. This can also make traveling a bit of a nuisance. You will hit a group of enemies that anchor you to a location, thus forcing you to fight them. It can be a pain to traverse long distances when you hit a group like this every few screens or so.

As with Diablo 2 there are simply too many variables, skills, and items to be able to answer all questions in a game manual. Too many options to know what build is the best for any given character. Luckily there is a very active forum for Sacred that has all the information you need and people that are ready to answer your questions.

There are some concerns with bugs with this game. I have not run into any serious bugs in the single player campaigns but I have experienced some crashes to the desktop when playing multiplayer.

This game is a steal at this low price!

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30 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great For Fast RPG & Diablo II Fans!, December 19, 2005

By	Lord X E Ryder <KoJ> "Lord X E Ryder ... (Southern California) - See all my reviews

Fun:5.0 out of 5 stars

I was impressed enough with Sacred to write this review, something that is not characteristic for me, a 37 year old electrician by day, here is why...

After reading about this game, and then trying the downloadable demo, I decided to go ahead and purchase two copies. Two? Yes, because I play with my wife on our network. What do I know about games? I started at 10 with an Apple ][ playing RPGs like Ultima (the first version in monochrome!), and was hooked. Many years and games later we moved on to Diablo, then D2.

Sacred is quite "Diablo-ish", with some interesting perks. We loved Diablo II with the LOD expansion, and played it until we defeated it on the highest difficulty. What now? Well nothing, we were done, and the areas were quite linear - you start at one end and go to the other mostly, and to your objective. But D2 is a great game for a fast paced RPG and has a very high fun factor (5 stars I would say).

Next we played Neverwinter Nights, and the two expansions for this great game. I ran a standalone server with a world I created for 3 years, and it was fabulous! Also a very fun game, 5 stars for sure, because you can build your own areas, create custom content and scripting as well.

I needed something else after those two, and that was how I found Sacred. It has been out for sometime now, but looked intriguing anyway, and it is a fun game. Since there are many reviews out there for you to read, I would like to comment on the things some reviewers considered to be the low points of the game, after playing through it myself.

"Path-finding does not work very well." I have to admit; at times it really does not manage to go where you clicked very well, but why is that? I feel it is because the builders worked very hard to make areas loaded with richly detailed terrain, and any game platform might have trouble finding a way to walk your character through the tiles. If I have to trade a little path-finding for the detail you will find in the games adventure areas, so be it! (Path-finding: the process of clicking and having the game program take your character to the clicked point by auto navigating through the terrain)

"The quests are often the same and you know exactly where to go instead of finding them for yourself." It is a good thing it helps you find them, because the game world is absolutely immense! Also, once you have accepted 4 or 5 quests, it would be frustrating to figure out what the heck you should do next or where to go. I did not find this to be a downer at all, and thought it helped things move along. Worth noting: You can go wherever you want, whenever you want, and the world is huge! It is good to follow the games main plotline though or you find yourself treading in VERY difficult areas running for your life!

"You cannot HotKey all your weapons or abilities in the beginning" No, you cannot, this is true. Once again, I did not find this to be a problem, as you did not HAVE very many abilities in the beginning. You end up with 5 weapon hot slots and 5 special ability hot slots a reasonable amount of levels later. The game lets you build a variety of custom moves into a Combo at a vendor called a Combo Master. This is absolutely unique and makes up for it I feel. Example: A Gladiator character (like a D2 Barbarian) of mine has a Combo that uses 3 special skills in a row. Back breaker, then Multi attack, finally Hard hit. This would be really hard or impossible to do in keystrokes but the effect is you throw your enemy on the ground stunning them, use your feet, hands and head to pummel them, and finish with a critical hit type move with your equipped weapon. I created this move myself and it works great - surely someone else has done so, but the freedom to make these up yourself is quite novel.

"There are 5 un-stackable potion types." Also true, but with a huge backpack and huge bank chest, I did not find this to be a problem. Also, there are vendors everywhere, and you end up with a lot of gold, so you can buy anything you need easily enough.

"Sacred's combat system frequently feels finicky - it's too easy for your character to either fail to line up an attack (particularly on horseback) or to stop attacking altogether." This was my biggest concern, until I played the demo. I have owned and ridden horses, and I can tell you that if you were fighting from horseback, you are not always going to be able to get a clear shot! Instead of finding this annoying, I simply moved a step and attacked again, this time successfully. Once again, I did not find this to break the flow of the game. As for the combat system being finicky, I thought that not having a "sure thing" all the time made it interesting, not just another in a long line of fights.

"Multiplayer Sacred is lacking some polish in general, as lag occurs too frequently and there isn't a decent trading interface." Thankfully, the builders heard our concerns and released a patch that added a nice trade interface, and even the ability to teleport to another player - which is VERY helpful in such a massive world. The world is so big it could take you an hour to find someone otherwise! I have seen a couple bugs and an odd event or two. But once again, it did not ruin the game for our family in any way. The builders were also interested enough in our enjoyment to do more than address the needed patch fixes. They added a couple of new regions and several added quests, items and the like, making Sacred even bigger! Now there is an expansion out - Sacred Underworld!

In closing I would like to share what I really like about the game, just drawing some things off the top of my head. The zoom-able play window is great! Zoom out to travel, zoom in to see what is going on when you are fighting. The world is really vast - after a couple days play, your logbook typically reports you have seen about 2% of the worldmap! You can export your character anytime you like to any of 6 slots, and then select this character when you start a game, regardless of whether it is multi-player or single.

Being able to ride horses helps you cover the distances in the world A LOT. Since you cannot do some fighting moves while riding a horse (which makes perfect sense to me), I dismount, and walk fighting my way. When you are ready to ride back to town with your loot, just whistle for your horse (that's right whistle by clicking a horseshoe icon), which causes your horse to run up to you, and ride back to town! I could go on, but for the economical price you can get this game for, just get it! I do not think you will be disappointed. That is just my 2 copper pieces though.

Fair winds and good fortune,

X E Ryder of the KoJ Estate
http://www.case-enterprises.com/kooj/

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14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent!, September 13, 2005

By	Megan Knouff (Cincinnati, US) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Fun:5.0 out of 5 stars

I tend more towards RTS games, so when I randomly started playing Sacred Gold because it happened to be in my boyfriend's computer at the time, I was surprised to find myself hooked. (He still hasn't gotten his CD's back...)

Sacred has a wonderful plotline, something lacking in many RPG's, but its real strength lies in the actual gameplay. There is a main quest running throughout the game, but you can also complete numerous side quests for rewards--these side quests can even affect your reputation in the game, it seems. The quests make the game very wide-open and allows you to play at your leisure.

The Gold edition gives you eight different character types to choose from, and they happily stray a bit from the usual standards--yes, you have your dwarf, your battle mage, and your fighter, but you can also play a seraphim with angelic blood, a vampiress who is a knight by day, your choice of a wood elf or a dark elf, and my personal favorite, a demon. Each class has its own set of abilities, set as either spells or combat arts.

Sacred Gold also contains the Underworld expansion, which is possibly even better than the original game. It carries on the storyline and has more challenging quests, both in the side quest and the main quest.

Finally, this is a lovely game--the graphics are well above average, and the music--well, I have many of the tracks, especially from Underworld, on my iTunes playlist.