Would have. Should have. Could have. Seems to be the beginning of every sentence I am using to describe this game. What should have been a cool game has far too many flaws to be recommended. Even though it has done a decent job of what is often a complaint, and put in the playable female avatars, there are still far too many problems with game-play for it to be worth putting up with. Most games which are story driven give you one character – usually male. For example in games like Assassins Creed where the character is a hologram, there is no reason why the story could not have accommodated a female avatar, but they chose not to anyway. Instead of full character creation, in Sacred 2 a good compromise was made by allowing you to select from six characters. Three different female fighters (or males). You can customize them with a few different hair colors and styles. It isn’t as good as being able to create a character yourself, but it is forgivable because the story line has been expanded to suit the scenarios for each one. A good solution.
The clothing options for the females is not too skimpy. They start with a sports bra and skirt type of outfit. You can later choose clothing, such as the “tunic” from pick ups. However the tunic is actually more of a halter top. You can make the characters as covered up or as slutty as you like. In the case of the Dryad, she has a Divine shield that will protect her without covering up her long legs and big boobs with armor. Unfortunately bad choices of foot wear are still perpetuated here. On the Seraphim high heel sandals suck for running and fighting. Other shoes look muddy and indistinct, per usual as in most games once again.

The greatest difficulty and frustration in the game comes from strange truncated camera views. It persists on both settings, the Following setting being terrible or the Static setting merely being tolerable.  It’s supposedly a 3rd person view point but there isn’t a way to alter the perspective. You are always trying to level out the angle for over an shoulder view but never get it. This was giving me eyestrain. It looks as though she is always looking down at the ground. You never see an entire building, or mountain when you are standing in front of it.

There are targets that you can’t see at all. You can shoot them, off camera. But then you won’t be able to see how to get to them to pick up the drops. That leads to running all around until you stumble upon the corpse.  If you don’t have a ranged weapon, you wouldn’t get to them at all. Even going to the merchant is messed up as well. When the merchant is seated at his table instead of looking at him, the camera takes you someplace else so that you are staring at a wall inside one building over.

There’s no aiming or target mechanism for bow shots for the Dryad. When you intuitively want to press R1 or L1 for targeting, it’s not there. Instead there are all sorts of slots taking up all of the controller’s real estate. If you can’t see what you are shooting at – it isn’t a game.

Sure all the loot is great, but add ons and mods for weapons and magic should be secondary to the game’s mechanics. If it is too hard to see and navigate then you aren’t going to stick around long enough for the elaborate loot. It almost seems as though all the fancy named weapons and glittery armor are to make up for an inferior engine.

It is a shame. You’ll see beautifully rendered flowers, and dust kicks up from footsteps, and other details, but you can’t really make the camera work to see where you are going or shooting. The water on the beaches has good lighting effects. Overall the graphics are pretty good. But, I’m saying “but” again. There are invisible  incomprehensibly placed walls everywhere. Those  lovely shoreline scenes are all around, but you can’t swim. Fishing would have been nice too. Natural rock formations and bridges are there begging to be clambered up on to look out at vistas and you can’t. To top it off she runs in slow motion.

Worst of she all can’t jump or climb. I can’t go through an entire game where the character cannot jump. Any credible video game producer should never let a game leave the building with a character that cannot jump. It’s inexcusable.

The game occasionally seizes up. It does clear in most cases. It  stutters and even crashes. All around this game we see shitty programming. For example she can open a door, and then hit herself in the ass with it instead of going inside of it. She ends up on the wrong side of the door. Then she has to walk through the door, instead of past it. Frequently she and the NPC’s do odd things like walking through walls and objects or get stuck in shrubs. It is just sloppy programming. The enemy AI is as dumb as a rock.

There are too many mods and slots for weapons and magic. Too much emphasis was placed on the design and the loot than the functionality of game-play. On the map you see red triangles representing enemies, when they start shooting you  might see up to their knees, or not at all.

There’s a steep learning curve, not due to learning skills, like Heavenly Sword but because of the offbeat control scheme. I wouldn’t object to new innovation. The standard menus are there but you have to contort your fingers into pretzels to equip and use items.  Everything is so over complicated that it will drive you crazy.

With the wicked and wild female avatars it reminds me of Summoner. It plays like crap which is more similar to X-Blades. If you don’t mind struggling your way through a game, rent it, or if you’ve all ready bought this piece of work, good luck to you. It is far too flawed to be bothered with when there are so many other games to play. For the amount of time you would spend developing this character you are better off investing that time on a PC MMO. I give Sacred 2 : Fallen Angel, 3 squealing piglets out of 10.