Sacred 3 Review

Sacred 3, the third game in the series of which has so far, had a mixture of criticism. Rather than improving on its original concept, Sacred 3 ends up being an action brawler much like the critically acclaimed Diablo series.  Sacred 3 follows the guardians of the legendary, their bond between its inhabitants helped ensure a peaceful  and land for centuries, but they’ve since been forgotten. The Ruler of the Ashen Empire has allied himself with evil forces in order to open the gates to the underworld. Because of the sheer evil a resistance was formed thus creating you, the hero or heroine.

The game offers you a choice of characters and from there the game drops you into a vibrant, beautiful game world that is sadly restrained by boundaries. Picturesque levels are a delight to the eye if stood still and everything from the scenery to character models have a polished look. The story itself is rather linear as are the levels, each level basically involves you defeating areas of enemies until you get to the end of a level where you must endure a boss fight.

Sacred 3 is therefore made to be played together as a drop in system is automatically in place and a player can join unannounced to help purge the evil and keep you alive. This idea, much like Diablo works well, but sadly Sacred 3 falls short as playing together isn’t much fun in Sacred 3. There are minimal amounts of loot, a confusing RPG leveling system and an extremely abnormal amount of framerate drops throughout.

The game constantly stutters, even when there’s little or nothing going on. The voice acting is at times grating and the repetitiveness, although separated by bonus levels, can’t be ignored. Sacred 3 seems slightly unfinished.

The game does offer a vast amount of content, though, and as mentioned above, each level looks stunning. The story lasted well over 10 hours for me as I often went around collecting as much gold as I could in order to pay for character upgrades.

Sacred 3 despite its shortcomings and change of direction still feels like a part of the series. You will either love it or hate it and as fans of the series, probably the latter. All the effort put in to make the game accessible to a larger audience has only ruined the core foundations. For me the experience was somewhat lackluster, be sure to let me know what you think of Sacred 3 below!