Sacred 3 Review: It’s not Sacred Anymore

After its collapse and eventual bankruptcy, Ascaron’s swan song, Sacred 2, was bitter-sweet. Plagued with bugs at launch, it was quickly polished and became one of the few decent open-world hack’n’slash adventures. Deep Silver then picked up the series, and has released two Sacred titles to date, including this latest adventure: Sacred 3.

Sacred 2 wasn’t perfect, but it certainly set a high benchmark. The Sacred franchise has never been a AAA series, but it tried its darnedest. Creating an open world game is very difficult, then add on a huge number of weapons and armor with dozens of stats and skills to consider, hundreds of quests, and more Easter eggs than a bunny omelet, it was no surprise there were more than a few bugs in the mix. Fast forward a few months, and it was definitely worthy of praise.

When Ascaron went bankrupt, a handful of programmers and beta testers stayed on to finish the game off, and even release an expansion. Since then it was bought up by Deep Silver, which has slowly been working on a couple of titles. While hopes were high for what was to come after Sacred 2, it would seem the market has changed over the years; open world is no longer in fashion, neither are stat junkies, customization and hack’n’slash loot-fests… because Sacred 3 is none of the above. Welcome to the new-age genre-bending madness, as I present to you Sacred 3, the Arcade Dungeon Crawling Adventure!

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