Sacred Review
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The interface is well crafted, taking up a minimum amount of your monitor screen. You have hotkeys for commonly used weapons, feats, and potions. There is a halo around your character icon to let you see how your hit points are holding up. And as I indicated previously, you have a quest compass to keep you pointed in the right direction. You can access a character screen, your journal, and your inventory. You have a limited amount of inventory space, and potions do not stack (which can be irritating). And while there are treasure chests in towns for you to store your stuff, they all share one inventory (so what you put in the chest in one location is available to you at the chest in another location).
Sacred is billed as an RPG, but for me that means I get to develop and customize a character which is not quite the case with Sacred. You will get to pick your character's name, equip them as you see fit during the game, and level them up the way you like (assigning ability and skill points), but otherwise you are basically choosing from six pregenerated characters to play.
You can be a gladiator, seraphim, wood elf, dark elf, battle mage, or vampiress. The gladiator is a burly redheaded male, homologous to the standard fighter type. The seraphim is a long blonde haired female described as a warrior angel. She is somewhat like a paladin, with some magical attributes, but an overall fighter vibe. The wood elf is also female, akin to a ranger with an archery focus. The dark elf is a male specializing in stealth think, (drow assassin.) The battle mage (male) is what you'd think a combination of fighter and magic-user, but pretty good at the fighting. The vampiress is a raven-tressed female who is a warrior by day and a vampire by night. Each character has its own set of combat arts, but some characters have access to the same ones (for example, all characters except the battle mage have access to a combat art which involves a whirlwind type of attack).
Your character has six ability scores (charisma, endurance, etc.) that will improve as you increase in level. There is an automatic increase in the abilities that are key to your chosen character, plus you can assign one point yourself. As you kill things and complete quests, you gain experience, which leads to level increases. You'll start off with two skill areas, and you can add new skills as you hit certain levels. Skill areas include things like sword lore, dual wielding, parrying, and so forth. Different characters have access to different skills, with overlap of course.
I could see wanting to play each character type at least once they each get different combat arts, weapons, and armor, as well as looking different and having different voice sets. To explore the entire world and complete all the quests with each character type would consume an unearthly amount of time. This translates to a strong replay value for the game.
Depending on which type of character you play, you will also get a different opening and series of initial quests, but once past that, the game plays the same for everyone. Part of that sameness of play will revolve around a lot of fighting.
Combat is a simple point-and-click affair in Sacred, usually boiling down to constantly attacking something until its dead without much finesse involved. But aside from your standard attack, you can use combat arts, which are special attack modes (like (hard hit,) which is a type of power attack), and combinations of them that are created by merchants known as combo masters.
