| System: PC*, PS3, Xbox 360 |  |
| Dev: Keen Games | |
| Pub: Deep Silver | |
| Release: August 5, 2014 | |
| Players: 1 | |
| Screen Resolution: 480p-1080p | Blood, Suggestive Themes, Violence |
Complicating matters even more is the fact that there are more sidequests than there are main quests in the game. If you are a completionist, like me, then you’ll start grinding away on the sidequests as soon as you can. That’s great, cause it makes you balloon upward in level. However, you soon realize after two or three sidequests that you will now be at a higher level for the whole game and the difficulty level just plummeted. You can ignore the sidequests if you want to have a better gameplay experience, but then you miss out on all of the content. It’s kind of a catch 22.
The game plays best when played by other people. Note that this makes the game even easier but you kind of just let that slide when you are working together with friends.
Unfortunately, the game has a horrendous online mode, if only because of the netcode. The game intelligently uses a style of rollback netcode so you don’t experience lag in your button presses, but as a result, characters are constantly teleporting around. You’ll walk a good ten feet and then teleport back to where you started, and then teleport forward again, and then you’ll swing at an enemy and he won’t be there, and then the game will hang up for five seconds, fast forward like crazy, hang up for another 3 seconds, and so on. These problems are only exacerbated when your party size increases. I’ve had decent enough games with two players, but four player games were almost always unplayable.
I have never played a Sacred game before in my life and Sacred 3 is not selling me on the franchise. I admit I had some fun mindlessly hacking and slashing my way through enemies, but that’s all it was: mindless fun. If that’s all you want out of your top down RPGs, go nuts. But there are so many other great and honestly deep titles out there, from Diablo III to Torchlight 2, to Shadowrun Returns, to Transistor. It’s hard to justify paying full price for a game that is this shallow.
In the end, I don’t think Sacred 3 knew what its own genre was. If it was self-aware that this was nothing more than a hack and slash dungeon crawler, it could have gone the extra mile and given it a refreshing arcade feel, like Dragon’s Crown did. However, Sacred 3 thinks it’s a serious ARPG, and as a serious ARPG it simply falls up short.
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By Angelo M. D’Argenio Contributing Writer Date: August 11, 2014 |
Game Features:
