Video Games Suck - Sacred Underworld

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In many ways, Sacred is an adventure in self-realization: The realization that the game you brought costs three dollars less than the Diablo Battlechest collection and you can't take it back because it's a PC game.

There is only one requirement for making a good Diablo clone: The game needs to be enjoyable. This single, obvious and simple rule has been overlooked by almost every Diablo ripoff in history, from Icewind Dale's stupidly boring gameplay to Dungeon Siege's clunky crappiness to Titan Quest's general suckitude.

Sacred is another in the long line of Diablo clones that completely miss the point - the game is as fun as having sex with roseanne while wearing a sandpaper condom lined with razor blades and battery acid.

Touch

In Sacred you control one of eight mostly identical character classes as you wander and click. Due to the way none of the enemies in the game (including dragons and demons) are capable of killing a player who actually has hands, you'll mostly be doing the former; which is good since the latter gets boring in eight seconds because all the enemies in the game have a total of two attacks (Melee and Fucking Annoying) between them and the main quest involves the most far-reaching fetch quest known to man.

Sacred's selling point is supposedly the its' world - on a playthrough you only visit (according to the game) 4% of the world. Too bad, then, that the remaining 96% is nothing but open plains with a tree every kilometre; apparently the developers hired a swedish minimalist designer for their world because it's completely featureless and smells strongly of fibreboard. However, it does let you live the fantasy of being a padded leotard-clad fairy doing superlong-distance cross-country sprint trials; something I found positively delightful.

Overall the gameplay would be boring but bland, except for the fuckheaded choice by the developers to give almost every 'magic' enemy in the game some gay-ass paralyzing attack. Trying to get from one town to another turns into a fucking faggotfest when you can easy out-run your enemies, but any mage-type enemy has the ability to cast (from up to three screens away) some bullfuck blue vine attack that completely immobilises your character for about ten seconds, in which you can't even attack or move at all.

To put it into perspective, imagine if you were playing Diablo and randomly every few seconds somebody took the mouse out of your hands, punched you in the dick, and then waited ten seconds before putting the mouse back in your hand. That's what Sacred is like, 90% of the time. Worse still, many of these enemies have fucking cunt-boilingly annoying sound effects and have no other attacks EXCEPT for the blue vines.

Sight

Due to budget cuts, the Sacred Developers needed to fire their three-person Ethiopean armor modelling team quarter of a way through development, so none of the armor you can get in the game looks even remotely impressive - about the best you can find is some light chainmail which shares the model of the padded bedsheet armor and the leather man-girdle. I dunno about you, but if i'm going to play a boring derivitive diablo clone I'd at least like to look like i'm not fresh from an AO-rated LARP festival.

Sacred seems to have fair 2D graphics until you get out of the area shown in the demo and realize that there's a total of two and a half different texture sets in the whole game and three of those are just color swaps of each other. Character animations are terrible with characters either lumbering like they were prison raped during a bad piles infection or prancing around like a 'sperging fairy.

Sound

Sacred's audio is as bland as burger king; annoying alliteration aside there's the standard generic orchestra mixed in with voice actors headhunted from the closest wendy's and sound effects from a playstation game. Next!

Smell

Upon removing Sacred from its' jewel case, I lifted it to my nose and gave it a sniff. Its' aroma was something akin to burnt paint, with touches of fresh marker pen; not bad. Overall, Sacred's smell is its' best feature, making it little wonder that the developers have already produced a successful line of "Sacred: The Aroma" air fresheners.

Taste

Sacred does not taste good, even when grilled with cheese.

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Following Suislide's rhetoric in his Sacred (2) Review, I am incredibly heterosexual at this point in time for once: -1000000/10