Pretty
If you’ve played Diablo II, you know it hasn’t aged well. With just one or two levels of detail, things didn’t even look all that hot when it was released back in mid-2000. Yep, Diablo II is six and a half years old. Sacred sidesteps this with a very pretty 2D world with three levels of zoom controlled in real-time with the mousewheel. I’d venture to say that it’s probably the last great 2D action RPG, since its sequel, Sacred II, is being built with a 3D engine.

Packed with Innovations
If it was just a prettier clone of Diablo II it might be worth playing, especially at US$10, but this game has a long list of very fun innovations that make it even more appealing.

Sacred has removed a bunch of things that I definitely don’t miss. First off, there are no arrows or bolts. Throw in no weapon durability and you’re not worrying about constantly repairing your gear. How about no mana? That’s right, spells don’t take mana, they’re instead classified as Special Abilities. Every class has special abilities, they recharge at different rates and those rates can be affected by equipment. Did you like the stamina bar in Diablo II? Me neither, so out it goes, letting you run all you want. As they say it’s not the running from the monster that gets you, it’s the sudden stop at the end when you run out of breath.

How about picking up all that stuff on the battlefield that creatures drop? Hold down Alt in Sacred and clickable names appear as they do in Diablo II. Or just hit A or the Pickup-All button and your character will run around and pick up everything automatically. Tired of cluttering up inventory with simple items? You can set auto-pickup to fetch just rare items and gold.

Remember when later Diablo II patches gave you two sets of weapons in Diablo II? Sacred gives up to four of them and keeps them from cluttering up your inventory when not in use, with 1 through 4 as hot buttons for switching weapon sets. Special Ability hot-buttons are similarly assigned, as are a few potion hot-buttons with the all-important health potion drink function attached to the space bar.

The skill tree in Diablo has been broken out into two separate sections: Special Abilities and Skills. Special Abilities are active abilities that are often specific to a class. The Gladiator (warrior) may have a Hard Hit ability while the Battle Mage will start with a Fireball. These recharge with time, as I said, and you earn them not by leveling but by monsters dropping them. A simple right-click and you’re in business.

Skills are passive and listed as a separate set of stats behind your main Strength, Intelligence, and other stats. These can include things like Disarming, which lets you send an opponent’s weapon flying with a *clang* every so often and even Riding. Riding?

Neigh!
Sacred has horses, and they’re a great addition to the classic hack-and-slash gameplay. The Riding skill lets you buy or otherwise aquire a horse, and each horse has different stats, including speed. This can let you cross very long stretches of terrain very quickly, gives you some special mounted attacks, and even lets you fight from horseback using your various weapon sets. Horseback riding isn’t all wine and roses, however. You do lose some attack speed from horseback in return for a bit of protection, and the horse can be killed. The nice thing is that you can call your horse from just about anywhere. They just might not reach you with the armor they had on when you last left them. There are bandits everywhere, you know.

Balanced
But do all these things make you too powerful for the game to be fun? In a word, no. The game world is just massive, which means it takes quite a long time on a very fast horse to navigate it. There are a very wide variety of foes to fight and places to see. I can say all of this and I haven’t even left Act I yet.

Get Lost!
Can you get lost? Not unless you want to. The quest logbook is excellent, and a mini-compass gives you an arrow to the major quest you’re working on as well as the subquest you’ve selected. Sub-quests can be changed by clicking on an unfinished quest on a list, and the ones you finish or fail stay on your maps as points of reference for later. It’s very easy to resume a quest you were working on and while they’re all (so far) pretty simple fetch, escort, or monster slaying quests, they’re still fun and satisfying to polish off one after another.

And just when I think I’ve seen everything, the game throws another twist. Twists like flying enemies. Twists like the magic item effect that makes low-level enemies die on sight. Twists like finding a foe on horseback, requiring me to slay his horse first, then him.

There aren’t many downsides
There are a few downsides to the game, but you’ll probably agree they don’t take much away from it.

There’s also an online mode where you can take your offline character online with a friend to continue questing together, or you can start a separate game world where you can visit any area of the game from a central hub of teleporters to test your mettle against any of the game’s monsters. I’ve only tried the online mode once, and found almost nobody playing. The game ran well for the short time I was online, and text chat worked pretty well, and I haven’t seen any complaints about online play, so I’ll leave it at that.

How To Get It
There’s a wrinkle here, and it’s the fact that it’s very hard to find the game at retail. I haven’t seen it again at any BestBuy, Circuit City, CompUSA, or Target store in my home state of New Jersey since the one day I picked mine up at BestBuy, and after I recommended it to him James spent a good two weeks hunting for one on Long Island in New York until settling on GameZone’s download service at a reasonable US$10. In case you’re wondering, so far he really likes it too.

So go get Sacred, and click-click-click your way to glory!