Sacred 3 review
The third installment of the highly enjoyable fantasy romp takes players on a fun-filled excursion through ‘hack and slash land’ as Sacred 3 take gamers back down the familiar ARPG format for its latest outing.
Make no mistake, sometimes there is nothing more enjoyable than getting home after a hard days work and slipping into the Rocker with a few cold ones within arms reach and then letting all your pent-up anger and frustration loose in one foul temper as you cleave your way through a hack and slash title. Scared 3 will satisfy that urge, but what if you are looking for something a little deeper? What if you want a more meaningful, more involved RPG experience instead of just button-mashing blood-letting?
Well, you should have bloody well installed Skyrim or Dark Souls 2 then shouldn’t you!
I ask you, all this whining in the reviews and crocodile-teared rants by outraged ‘gamers’ is just beyond me? Didn’t you guys see any of the trailers? Didn’t you read any of the preview articles, the mountains of press releases or forum debates?
You did? Then what the Hell is your problem?
Scared 3 made no promises to be the next Elder Scrolls clone. Nor did it make any kind of outlandish move towards being the arcade version The Witcher. No, instead what the developers ‘told’ us all it would, it was. A hack and slash time-killer that would be an arcade take on a classic format. And if you just go into the game with your eyes wide open as opposed to having them blinkered by fanboyism or spoiled brat syndrome then you would enjoy this action-packed romp for the bubblegum gaming event that it clearly is.
A polished performance with vibrant graphics Scared 3 makes no excuses for taking the franchise in a new direction, but boy! have some unforgiving types ever got their panties wedged firmly in their butt cheeks about it?
Sacred 3 may have one foot in the Diablo camp with the other firmly wedged somewhere between God of War and Warhammer 40,000 Space Marine this is a title that has enough going on in it to keep you more than happy for a good 6-10 hours, but if it is depth and character dialogue you are looking for then perhaps something with a little more substance would better suit your needs.
That’s not to say that the game does not have any kind of storyline or continuing plot, far from it. Scared 3 builds around a tale of a group of heroes coming together to defeat an unholy collection of minor demons and foes on the way to battling it out with the ‘Main Baddie’. Inspiring and original it may not be, but then again how many other videogames with storylines exactly the same as this have been fawned over by gushing ‘ree-voowers’ year in and year out? Pretty much the entire RPG and Hack and Slash genres.
The combat ahs been simplified to allow for quick and pleasant button-mashing, although it has to be said that there are a goodly amount of attacks and spells to be going on with, and the vast majority of them have devastatingly satisfying results.
Missions are standard fare with a linear pre-ordained feel to them, but then again this is not billed as an open world title, more so Scared 3 revels in it’s no nonsense arcade feel and delivers wave upon wave of screaming, blood thirsty enemies for you to contend with instead of wandering aimlessly around the gamezones hour after hour as you search for some nondescript flower or herb to make a slave for your festering wounds before you bleed out.
Of course, one glaring issue that we could not forgive, although hopefully we will be able to forget, is the completely inane humour littering the dialogue. It feels like you have to tip-toe your way through a field of festering dog turds as you pursue a pack of incontinent hounds across the realm such are ‘jokes’ and ‘witty’ one-liners from the characters.
Quite why the developer thought that giving such prose to their line up is anyone’s guess, but after listening to a preening priest cry our ‘Sexy’ after every fight, introduction of a female character, pause in the game, load screen and weapon selection is just one step too far. Of course, it isn’t really that bad but it is that grating and so ultimately it will make it seem like the battlemage utters that drivel every other minute.
The combat itself is pretty straight forward with players requiring little more than a couple of active digits to get the most out of the game, but there are brief interludes where gamers will have the opportunity to level up skills and attributes thanks to the XP system, but if truth be told there is little incentive to do just that with a small helping of spells and skills that require little to no tweaking.
That being said the opportunity to upgrade ‘is’ there for those of you out there who wish it, but in the cold light of day it is little more than frosting on a very ordinary Victoria sponge cake.
Naturally with any kind of change there are always going to be some things that cause the expected gripes, and Sacred 3 does have its share of those, most particularly with the total loss of the unique races and the individuality that each character class and race brought to the games appeal.
Many will argue that Scared 3 has moved too far away from what gave the game its likeable appeal in the first place, and some of the points are right in their assessment, but as we stated earlier if you go into the game with your eyes open and do not expect anything more than a time-killer that is not too taxing on the grey matter then you will not be as disappointed as some, it would seem.
All told Sacred 3 does many things, most of them with lukewarm mediocrity and some of them just outright wrong, but overall the mainstay of this arcade role-playing game is average. Decent visuals and smooth gameplay are the order of the day with the storyline doing just enough to keep gamers interested without having them perched on the edge of their seats. Combat is passable and yet the RPG aspects of the XP collection and expenditure are overlooked in favour of a more linear outlook. To offer up a score of around a 5 would seem pretty justifiable, but we will add an extra point to Sacred 3 for its honesty in that the developer never used spin doctors and bullshit to sell their game, and delivered on exactly what they promised instead. 6 out of 10
FINAL THOUGHT:
One point we would like to raise in defence of Sacred 3 is this latest obsession with both the console camps of Microsoft and Sony banging on and on about the joys of the indie developer. It would seem, then, that just as long as an established studio does not have the sheer audacity to attempt to bring a bubblegum game to the masses then that is okay. What do we mean by this? Let us explain:
Had Sacred 3 been developed by a studio such as Coffee Stain, for example, then perhaps the reviewers would have been a lot more forgiving than they are. It seems to us here at GmP that when a developer that has tasted success, or one that has the good sense to affiliate themselves to a publishing house, makes an out-and-out arcade title that they are then vilified for said game. You would think that with both sets of Xbox and Sony fanboys waffling on day in and day out about the merits of smaller arcade and indie titles that when they actually got one they would just have the good grace to enjoy the damn thing instead of pulling it to pieces in their over exuberant state of ‘everything is shit’ journalism just to score hits with the viewer count.
TITLE: Sacred 3
FORMAT: PlayStation 3 [reviewed])
DEVELOPER: Keen Games
PUBLISHER: Deep Silver
RELEASE DATE: NA August 5, 2014
EU August 1, 2014
PRICE: Sacred 3 GAME UK £37.99
PEGI RATING: PEGI 16
SCORE OUT OF 10: 6 OUT OF 10
