Sacred 3 review: is nothing sacred any more?

We were originally going to do a video review of Sacred 3. But we can’t, because you cannot put a voice to a facepalm.

Sacred 3 is the third game in the Sacred series, and has been developed for PC, Playstation 3, and Xbox 360. It’s a hack-and-slash brawler that looks dated before its time, and certainly a far cry from the first Sacred dungeon-crawler, which I thoroughly enjoyed for its lore, characters, and combat.

While I have not tried Sacred 2: Fallen Angel, I wager it’s safe to say that Sacred 3 is a huge departure from the dungeon-crawling Diablo-like PC game that the series set out to be.

What’s good

To be fair, Sacred 3 does have some redeeming qualities. While the PC version of the game is a straight-out port from the console one, it provides you with a satisfyingly-linear monster-bashing experience. You can never get lost in the map, and you can up the difficulty when you feel like you need a challenge.

[fve]http://youtu.be/yNZmUpW3j9g[/fve]

I like that combat is kept simple, with no fancy combos you need to execute. It’s great for poorly-coordinated gamers like myself. And since Sacred 3 for PC is a console port, you can evade monsters and spam special attacks at the literal press of a button. Visually, the game’s resolution isn’t much to shout about, but feedback from attacks is pretty solid, and can make up for that if you aren’t picky.

What’s bad

It’s a console port. It handles badly, and is rather buggy. You move your character with WASD and attack with your mouse and the number keys one and two. Controls for a PC game just aren’t mapped that way. If a program pops up midway through your game, the full-screen resolution falters and your character bugs, and starts moving south-east repeatedly.

Checkpoints are only useful if you die, meaning if your game bugs and you restart it (or if you quit because you have something else to do) you start from the very beginning of that particular chapter. And nothing turns me off the gameplay like having to run through the entire level again, repeatedly, when there are checkpoints!

The repetitive experience is made worse by Sacred 3’s horrendous dialogue. While professionally voiced and annotated with characteristically-stylized character portraits and pop-ups, the dialogue is just…cliche. It’s dated. It’s bad. Your world’s best telepath guide has all the personality of a standard Valley girl, while her adoptive mother is grave and sincere, as all adoptive mothers who are also the leaders of an ancient race are. Your enemy makes fun of you with dumb jokes, like calling you a chicken and then clucking. The voice acting isn’t bad, it’s what they say that will make you cringe.

(See: Bombing Bastards review: explosive for all the wrong reasons)

The biggest travesty about Sacred 3 is actually the loss of its unique races. Sacred gave ARPG characters wings before Diablo III, and while its gameplay wasn’t the most innovative, its lore was a nice change from all the gothic seriousness of Diablo. The different races also had different attributes, and had to be handled differently. Now, the Seraphim, the Vampire, the Dragon Mage, the Dryad, and even the High Elf have all been reduced to characters that have all the flexibility of four pathetic buttons.