Sacred 2 Fallen Angel Remastered, Our Review!

Sacred 2 Fallen Angel Remastered, how much does the world of Ancaria improve?

Directly from the distant year 2008, the second chapter of Sacred returns to our gaming machines, a saga that enjoyed considerable success in the past and had three main episodes, demonstrating a solid core of supporting fans, although the last (and not exactly successful episode) dates back to 2014. Today we are on these pages to bring you our review of Sacred 2 Fallen Angel Remastered (Xbox Series X edition), a title that, at the time, positioned itself as an alternative to His Majesty Diablo, demonstrating good qualities and decent inventiveness, giving birth to a more than decent hack and slash. SparklingBit has worked to create a remastered in the true sense of the word, which takes all the original content (including the Ice & Blood expansion) and revamps it, adding only a few small novelties aimed at improving some elements of the game.

We are facing a prequel to the saga, where the world of Ancaria finds itself in a dangerous situation where T-Energy is at the center of power struggles, while corrupting Ancaria itself. There are seven characters available to play, each with the possibility of playing a Light campaign and a Shadow campaign, the first dedicated to restoring the situation to normal, the second to taking advantage of the opportunity to seize power. The only exceptions are the Seraphim, who can only play the Light campaign, and the Inquisitor, who can only choose the Shadow campaign. Interestingly, although the game structure is not modified except for the usable abilities, all this variety gives a good sense of personalization, given that the campaigns will have differentiated narrative lines.

On the other hand, the world of Sacred has always been marked by good underlying writing, with a decently studied lore imbued with a predominant irony that tempers dramatic and catastrophic themes. In short, playing Sacred 2 means experiencing fantasy adventures in a boundless world (the map is enormous), but the script does not spare sarcastic jokes that desecrate genre tropes or break the fourth wall, perhaps making fun of the gamer for being inactive for too long, with the character not hesitating to make witty remarks, thanks also to good Italian voice acting, like the legendary phrase "it's always like this, first the anxiety of installing it and then they don't even play it." As mentioned before, we are facing a classic hack and slash where you keep hitting enemies that attack you, using tons of available weapons and armor, plus magic, special abilities, and so on.

We will have main quests and a myriad of secondary ones, with the latter not only expanding the information we will have about the setting, but above all giving us adequate experience points to grow and reach the end of the plot without too many worries. At the beginning of the game, we have two difficulty levels available, Bronze and Silver, the first very simple and the second a bit more challenging. By completing a campaign on Silver, we can unlock the Gold level and so on, up to five levels with ever-increasing challenges. If everything seems quite easy in the first few hours, know that some situations greatly increase the chances of dying, although the protagonists are immortal and will always have a respawn point... provided you don't choose the game mode where death means definitive game over, naturally indicated only for those seeking a hardcore experience.

Sacred 2 Fallen Angel Remastered, is it worth fighting again?

Let's look more specifically at the remastering work that Sacred 2 Fallen Angel Remastered has undergone, starting with the graphics. The visual impact has improved, but it's obvious that by maintaining the original assets, a miracle couldn't be hoped for. Let's say that the rendering makes the visual impact more suitable for modern panels, with textures, lighting, and polygons gaining in definition and a decent increase in viewing distance. Accompanying this article, you can see two screenshots where you can compare the Shadow Warrior from the original Xbox 360 edition and the current one on Xbox Series X, to give you an idea of the result. Nothing to say about the sound, where the music is decent, but without particular peaks, and it benefits from the already mentioned Italian voice acting that completes a full localization in our language. Unfortunately, there are some problems that deal a hard blow to the overall quality of Sacred 2 Fallen Angel Remastered, including some sporadic crashes and issues with character movement, which in some cases started walking on its own towards a point on the map while I was talking to a merchant, as if there had been an input that triggered the classic pathfinding. 

What is most annoying, however, is the problem related to the commands used to change weapons during combat, which often fail because they are not accepted if the protagonist is still swinging. In such a hack and slash, it would be very important, for example, to use the bow to hit distant enemies and quickly switch to sword and shield when they are close enough to us, and then, perhaps, switch to a two-handed axe to counter the arrival of a furious horde of kobolds. Well, all this is very unhelpful to the cause and even frustrating, especially when fighting many opponents and a quick and flexible management of weapons, magic, and abilities would be welcome.I would like to point out the addition of the possibility to open a dynamic map almost full screen that you can use while moving and that helps not to lose your bearings, but in general, menus and interface are quite chaotic and do not seem to have received particular optimization for controller use, although some small steps forward have been made compared to the original. 

Sacred 2 Fallen Angel Remastered brings back to light what was a good hack and slash, and despite the "pure" remastering work being visible and some slight improvements in "quality of life" having been made, substantial flaws remain that, today, cannot go unnoticed. If you loved Sacred 2 or are a fan of the genre, you can have fun for a few hours with this new incarnation of the game, but in the long run, some problems become apparent, especially because we are talking about a title that, to be completed in its entirety, perhaps experiencing all the campaigns of the various characters, can easily require more than 300 hours of gameplay. Who knows, maybe a future patch could further improve the situation and make this return to the world of Ancaria more pleasant, although it is a journey indicated only for the most nostalgic gamers.