Sacred 2: Fallen Angel is a epic sized game full of beautiful scenery, highly detailed characters, lots of quests, and tons of armor and gear to upgrade and collect. You can loose yourself for hours talking to everyone, reading every sign and gravestone, opening every door, jar, and chest. Truly a lot of work, time, creativity, and effort went into this game. The character models are gorgeous and the maps are huge! Nearly every terrain type you can imagine is here and several you didn't think of - and since I haven't explored every nook and cranny - there is sure to be more than I have seen. People who like WoW, Everquest, etc. will absolutely love this game. It is very much like a single player MMORPG - I know those are normally called just RPGs - but this for hard core RPG players - you know the difference. It's much more like WoW than Final Fantasy.
There are a few problems with the game. The character models, as I said, are highly detailed and very well done - but the camera angle is usually so dang far away, you can't really tell. It's only when you are able to "trap" the camera next to a wall or something that you get to see what your character - or your enemies, really look like.
Also, there are a few bugs... Sometimes, especially in a tightly packed graveyard, when you scan the area, you get error messages instead of the text of the tombstones. It's like the system is not able to find the files fast enough or something. Also, there are so many side quests, you can easily accept 10 in the first 20 minutes of the game, that you forget what you are supposed to be doing - and there is often precious little in the way of clues showing you which way to go to accomplish them. And very few of them have anything to do with your overall quest to either restore or take over the t-energy which controls the land.
The equipment system is kind of confusing, too. You often end up with equipment that you can't use, or can't use yet. And even telling the system which item you want to equip is confusing. For example, I wanted to switch to another weapon, so I unequipped my sword, and tried to pick another weapon. Of the 7 weapons I was carrying at the time, I wasn't able to equip *any* of them - including the one I just unequipped. That's either a bug, or the system is too confusing and unexplained to be usable.
One thing that really drove me crazy, too - the character creator. There are six classes. Each class has a total of 2 hair styles, and maybe 6 different colors of hair. So there are a grand total of 72 ways your character can possibly look. You can't even pick your gender. If you are a Sepharim - an Angel - you have to be a girl. Not to be overly picky - but the only angel names in the bible are male - Michael, Gabriel, Lucifer.... I'm not saying there are not girl angels, I'm just saying there are definitely male ones. Same thing for the other classes - three of them are male, three of them are female. Makes sense to me that these creatures have to reproduce somehow - and since they are obviously not asexual - we should be able to pick our gender as well as our race. Also, some more variety in the way the characters look would be awesome. There's little point to letting me "Customize" my character if the choices are so incredibly limited. It would have been better to just let us pick between 6 static characters. That would at least explain the lack of choice.
If you can get used to the wonky camera and a few bugs, can navigate unending sidequests and huge terrains, and can master the labyrinth equipment system - then you can spend hours and hours enjoying a beautiful, funny, exciting game. If you can't - skip this title.
For me, Sacred 2 gets a 7 out of 10. The makers know how to tell a good story, how to design beautiful characters and landscapes, how to come up with scores of quests, equipments, and lands - but they had a few problems translating that into a playable game. Heavy on the creative excellence, lighter on the technical excellence.
