Longevity. An incredibly huge map, which would take one hours to come close to uncovering, aswell as being a free roaming game(Thus, you won't be confined to a specific route).
An excellent variation & customisation in armour and weapons.
More than 200 levels for each character to grind, along with skills and attributes that make each and every character Unique.
The difficulty level can be raised to such a standard, if one dies, it means you DIE and will not be able to play the character any more.
Very unofrgiving, Which makes surviving so incredibly sweet.

Overall, 9/10.

There's only one thing I don't like about this, Not being able to see more. A limited viewing range. Somewhat of a half arsed camera. Though, That's just me.

Anyone else should give this a 10/10.

There is endless stuff to do, quests everywhere, loot everywhere, levels up and powers and BLIND GUARDIAN god I love this game.

That Said, WINDOWS 8 PLAYERS READ THIS.
You need to set compatibility settings. So go to
\Steam\steamapps\common\Sacred 2 Gold\system
Then right click Sacred2.exe and click compatibility.
Select Windows XP Service Pack 3 compatibility settings
Check "Run this program as an administrator"
Apply then restart your computer. Easy Peasy.

So a friend recommended this game to me while, by chance, he noticed it was 80% off. Never bought a better 5$ game. I am not, or have ever been, a big fan of Diablo style games. I just kind of missed that train. But this game broke my pre-concieved ideas about it in just the first few hours.

The world is pretty rich and just when I thought I was making progress on the map, I discovered I had only uncovered a dot of it. Every level, while comes slower than my personal taste, gives back benefits you can see each time, rather than a ton of levels all the time with hardly anything to show for each one. Another one of the games strong points is customization. Oh man the customization. It's not as intimidating as 'Path of Exile' (a Diablo-style game I tried), though a tad confusing at first. Even with reading up I still had that "trash first character" with my points being in places that were less than helpful. The 'runes' you get to increase your skills are pretty abundant as well, but not always with the ones you need, which can be solved by trading in 1-4 runes of any kind to pick the one you want, increasing your power at a good pace (for a small fee). Combine all that with a rich world, much like Skyrim, open and with entirely too much to do, with so much exploring to do, and you've got a game that will have your style of play, with the story and pacing that you want.

However the game's not perfect. Some annoying things like having to drop items and pick them back up to stack them, certain moves having a hard time targeting an enemy making you dance in place until you find that sweet spot, and not having a very clear chart of where your stats are coming from (though it does list which ones you have, just not if it's on your gear, temporary effect, etc). But if you aren't terribly anal about little bumps in the road, it's a great game to buy.

8.5/10, just a step bellow 9 for the minor issues.

9.9/10 A HUGE world with quirky comedy, killer combat and EPIC quests. Detailed, deep, min/max-ing doable but not necessary. This is "The Skyrim" of Hack 'n Slash games. Champions of Norrath on steroids. FAR better than Diablo 2 and 3 in my opinion. For $20 it is a STEAL. Love it. I took .1 points off for crashing 3 times in 350 hours.

Also I bought a new rig for this game because the GPU requirements were too much for my 2.4Ghz I3/ 9800GT gpu.

I am running a 3.4ghz I-9 and the newish Nvidia GTX 750ti EVGA -OC- SC. All settings CRANKED with an HD resolutions pack and never dips below 60FPS.

Best $1400 I have ever spent, this game is gorgeous when you can use all of the avaiable graphics.

Just buy it and play it and love it.

P.S. Sacred 3 was an insult to ALL gamers and should have NEVER been made !!!

this is a neat game. nice open world , hack and slash. heaps of places and things to see and do. nice easy controls and easy to understand. camera positionings is its only not so great feature in reguards to being able to see infront of yourself with some distance. but other then that its truely a great game

I love RPGs. In fact, I live for them. More open world, the better. I enjoy involved locales, scenic vistas, random quests which are not part of the main quest.

Sacred 2 has all of these things. As well as a complicated, involved character-building system, allowing you to customize your class from top to bottom. It's an ARPG, which involves more hack and slash than story, and I think that's a better side of "adventure" than long, drawn out speeches.

That being said, I didn't find this game entertaining. Don't get me wrong, the game has all of these things. In spades. There's more packed into this game than the last four or five I've played. And the control scheme and game play is almost identical to one of my old favorites, the original Dungeon Siege, as well as NWN1.

I just felt that as of the beginning, there was no real motivation aside from "level" and "loot" which takes me to the next region. I'm not talking themepark handholding. There are some bad mechanics at play here; like outleveling content and quests far before you've finished even a third of them. I'm still killing critters about 2-3 levels below me, forcing me to just walk off from 5 active quests to get into something a bit more challenging.

Secondarily, the "dungeon crawling" wasn't really done with anything interesting in most of the dungeons. Very few traps, no real reason to be there, just lots of slaughter and walking bags of XP and treasure. There was very little lore involved, so it's not like you're in "The Chaves of Chaos" or something, you're just in "RandomCave4332". There is some good humor here and there, and I can tell PnP players made this game. But aside from the few grave stones and a random floaty message, there's just.. something missing from these areas to make me WANT to explore them.

I'll probably come back to this in time and re-evaluate, but my initial 8 hours leaves me sort of wanting a reason (aside from the 1 minute cutscene at the beginning of the game) with what I'm doing, the places I'm visiting. Dungeon Siege sort of left you with a sense of wonder at seeing the lost dwarven caverns, crawling through the swamps of sadness or whatever.

This game is far more open world than most ARPGs, but has far less personality than many I've played. This is probably sacrilege to some, I just felt the mechanics were great, but the overall theme and feel left me wanting something with substance.

Now this my fellow humans is a fabulous game
the rp in this game is amazing and the game itself is just amazing
i don't think this game outdoes the diablos but my god it is almost just as good
the map is ♥♥♥♥ing huge and i love the combat
the skills you can unlock as you level up but you chose skill you want to add to your skill slots like ranged weapons,armour lore,pole arms, hafted weapons, blacksmith etc
overall i give this game a strong 10/10

EDIT PLEASE READ:
I recently bought a new laptop and when i first downloaded and installed again it worked fine but now when i open it everything says it fails and closes PLEASE HELP
EDIT:
i fixed it i unninstalled my nvidia physx driver and then downloaded the latest physx from the website

I've played this game to death on the Xbox 360, and that may very well repeat on PC. This is one of my favorite RPGs, and with good reason: A HUGE world to explore, tons of different enemies to fight, lots of loot to collect, 7 distinct classes with specialized loot, lots of skills and spells to learn... All of these things make this an RPG that's hard to put down. My only gripe is that you can't pause the game, even when playing offline, and I absolutely hate when games do that.

This is how Diablo III should have been.
Other than technical problems (personally I have had zero crashes win 8.1 64bit + Community patch), it's huge fun.

I am 67 yrs ! Sacred 2 gold is the best rpg for Avatar building i have played ! Lots of fun ! Trust experience kids ! Stalker

sacred 2 different from other RPG games , huge maps which divided into several areas , lots of side missions , and interesting complex leveling sistem , good graphic with may effect and powered with ageia physx.
the combat is satisfying but little to slow, you need to click a lot. side quest can be too much and repetitif. Boss battle can be difficult but chalenging.

is worth to buy ?YES

Sacred 2 is not just a game you play. Its passion! There is a lot to explore,especially in skills and items you can get.

Best ARPG ever.

You can play as robo-doggie!

Honesty its not the best Rpg. but its fun if you have nothing better do do :P

best of the sacred series, THIS is an amazing top-down diablo clone. it outdoes diablo in terms of depth, open world, length, etc...though maybe not quite as replay-able...

community patch

Best point and click out there with graphics that are still excellent. Character progression and story line make the game. Bummed that the developer went out of business and that multiplayer is no longer supported but Tunggle resolved that for us Sacred II geeks :)

Great open world game, huge map, hack&slash gameplay, decent story, and a lot of variation with weapons and skills.

It's better than Sacred 3.

Game won't start. Dug through forums, did everything that people recommended, and nothing. 20 bucks, burned. That's what I get for not reading the reviews, I guess...