Sacred 2: Fallen Angel Preview

GameSpot has whipped up a new preview of Sacred 2: Fallen Angel based on some recent hands-on time they were able to spend with the action RPG sequel.
Ascaron describes Sacred 2 as being "as close as you can get to an MMO without being an MMO." What that means is that 16 players on the PC or four players on Xbox Live can drop seamlessly into a campaign to play with friends. The enemy AI will automatically increase in difficulty depending on the size of the party, to keep things fair. Because 22 square miles is a lot of ground to cover, you can click on a friend's icon and warp to his or her location immediately. There's also a player-versus-player arena and a player-versus-environment mode, and all statistics earned there will carry over to your character in the campaign, and vice versa.

We jumped into the PC version to play a few quests as our shadow warrior alongside two seraphim controlled by Ascaron representatives. After warping to their location, we hacked and slashed away with our broad sword at pesky goblins and skeletons. On the PC, you simply point and click with the left mouse button to move and attack, and right click to use one of your selected combat arts. We decided to throw bright green flashes of undead energy, while the seraphim used lightning strikes. There wasn't much to our quest--we simply tracked down some robbers using our compass and beat them down with melee attacks. Soon their gold was ours, we returned the lost loot to the rightful owners, we gained some experience points, and we made Ancaria a little safer for everyone.

We did get a chance to peek at a few of the bosses in Sacred 2 that are so giant they take up almost the entire screen. A giant fire beast, similar to the balrog in The Lord of the Rings, hurled fireballs at us, and later, a giant squid tried to wrap our character in his crushing tentacles. Ouch.