Sacred 2 Remaster Review

We’re fans of all video games receiving a solid preservation treatment, which is why we thought Sacred 2 Remaster’s surprise announcement was great news for players whose first contact with the action-RPG subgenre was through Sacred 2: Fallen Angel’s weird and unexpected original console release. The game itself remains a middling attempt to reformulate Diablo’s DNA though.

Even by 2008 standards, Sacred 2 felt dated. Ascaron’s 2004 original did a lot right to stand apart from its closest relatives, mostly by doubling down on a massive open-world experience that dwarfed anything else in the action-RPG space. Its approach to freedom and class builds was also fresh enough. Only four years later, video games had become more complex and the action-RPG genre was undergoing a substantial evolution. The sequel’s answer was to go bigger and more ‘retro’ in its overall vibe and tone, with the latter being driven by parodies of RPG and fantasy tropes to the point Sacred 2 often is hard to take seriously, Blind Guardian music and cameo included.

Putting the misplaced tonal swings aside (Sacred 2 remained committed to behaving as a fantasy epic), the plot also wasn’t particularly engaging: Roughly 2,000 years before the events of the original game, the valuable but volatile substance called T-Energy has become the resource several factions are fighting over. Meanwhile, it’s leaking all over Ancaria and mutating beings, turning them into monsters. It’s up to the starring heroes to either cleanse the land or help the T-Energy change the world for the worse.

Beyond the presence of the ancient Seraphim and some region-related lore, Ancaria isn’t a particularly unique setting, and the lack of memorable characters really hurt Sacred 2’s staying power. It’s a generic fantasy video game that doesn’t take itself too seriously, yet the developers didn’t double down on that angle. As a direct result, most of the journey felt accidentally goofy, and revisiting it after all these years only makes the recurring ‘meta’ lines of dialogue stick out like sore thumb. My Shadow Warrior won’t stop making repetitive puns about being dead, trying incredibly hard to be Deadpool as some Inquisitor somberly explains the menace threatening Ancaria.

Mind you, if an overall sense of unintentional comedy was deal-breaker, we wouldn’t have played several RPG bangers, but Sacred 2’s problems only start there and become more obvious the more you play. Even as someone who played through the entire thing back in the day, I was struggling to find the motivation to push onward only a couple of hours in. The biggest offender would be the approach to side quest design; Ascaron felt down the rabbit hole of “bigger is better” and thus we ended up with literal hundreds of side quests that don’t differ much from the fetch quests you’d constantly come across in the MMORPGs of the 2000s.

This lack of compelling side content makes the absence of truly fun dungeons to clear more evident. Sacred 2’s focus on its overworld and giving action-RPG players lots of freedom give it a flavor of its own for sure, but too many of the genre’s staples had to be sacrificed in exchange, and the payoff isn’t there. At least, many locations are really interesting to explore and uncover, with all sorts of little details and fun blurbs of text making locales just to the side a random road feel lovingly handcrafted even if the side missions that point you in their direction aren’t particularly good.

This is why the optimal Sacred 2 journey is one that sticks to the core adventure – as a reminder, it splits into Good and Bad paths – and ignores all the filler. There’s even an achievement in the Remaster that rewards players who complete the main quest with no more than 20% of the map discovered. You’ll be walking a lot regardless (and you better interact with the spread-out resurrection pillars as soon as you see them), but focusing on the central path while absorbing some nice mid-2000s colorful fantasy environments ain’t so bad, and the unlockable mounts make the trek more bearable.

Sadly, almost every one of Sacred 2’s positives comes with two negatives, and that’s what has soured me on the game during my time back in Ancaria. The skills and progression systems – which already toyed with modular tress and runes like Diablo 3 would years later – are among the most interesting in the genre, yet the game (and its remaster) does an awful job of explaining anything, so chances are most newcomers and lapsed fans of the series won’t be making the most of their toons until they look up answers elsewhere.

Similarly, the combat can eventually become special in its own right and is always more calculated than Diablo’s relentless chaos, but too many hours early on are spent slowly swinging a weapon and missing (I’m not a big fan of action-RPG combat tinkering with CRPG mechanics that feel bad elsewhere) and trying to crack weapon combos. Simply put, Sacred 2 takes too long to become at least decent, and the traditional nature of this remaster means none of the base-level design issues have been addressed. The official description also states the combat is “smoother, more responsive” in the remaster, yet NPC pathfinding remains messy and some clicks on enemies fail to register because you’re one pixel off.

I have no big complaints about Sacred 2 Remaster’s presentation, on the other hand. Sure, it’s a light effort which merely aims to unify all of its content, add in controller support, and clean up the user experience as well as the visuals, but it gets the basics done. Purists should be happy with the effort done here, even if it means Sacred 2 is carrying past shortcomings over into a new era, like the generally terrible female VA and character models, or the wonky camera that likes to get in the way of the action.

Perhaps that’s THQ Nordic’s ultimate goal with this Sacred 2 Remaster: To please the old guard and give diehards another reason to revisit an okay-at-best action-RPG that simply hit them at the perfect time when they were kids and teenagers. Those curious about the subgenre and veterans who never quite got into the series are better off with sturdier and less confused top-down fantasy adventures. This isn’t an epic journey I’ll be finishing again.

Sacred 2 Remaster launches across PC (Steam), PS5, and Xbox Series X/S on November 11. The PC and console versions will be selling for $19.99 and $29.99 respectively, with a physical edition also available for the latter.