Sacred 2: Fallen Angel (Xbox 360, 2009)

Sacred 2 is a dungeon crawler game very much like the old Diablo games. The camera view is played top-down without an option to play over-the-shoulder or first-person which may bug some but the game isn’t designed to be played like that. The game can be played with 4 people on Xbox Live but it was the offline local multiplayer that really sold me. I was looking for a new game that the wife and I can play together and the top-down camera removes the need for a split screen (or awkward shared screen like Fable 2) and really works great.

The game itself is HUGE! There are only 6 characters (3 male and 3 female) with little or no customization but everything else is immense. The item catalog is gigantic with a large number of item slots on each character, the skill customization has so many paths to mix and match (this looks to be the most confusing) and the local multiplayer allowing both players to use and save their personal characters really makes for a great deal of variation. Even the controls feel huge. You map your spells and actions to your 4 buttons then each trigger opens up 4 more slots. Then add in customizable combos that can be set up and mapped to a button slot. The map also is huge, it's amazing how big it is. I think I have 5 hours logged on 1 character which I’ve spent just exploring and have 3% of the map discovered. And that's skipping many of the quests (which is another gigantic piece, there are quests at every turn in this game) and ignoring the mini dungeons.

Here are a few tips for this game. First, turn off the follow cam. Unfortunately this has a shaky feel that many complain about and static is much nicer. Second, buy the carrier imp off the marketplace. I think it was about $3 but it allows you to access your hero chest (bank-like storage that is shared with ALL characters you have) from anywhere in the game rather than just major towns. Lastly, local multiplayer (if one player like my wife doesn’t have Xbox Live) should be set up in “offline’ mode and enters the game by pressing “start”. They kinda left that part out of the manual and it took time playing around for us to figure out.

Overall a great RPG with a nice and different feel and one of the best local multi-player action games we have played.