Sacred 2

All this is well and good, but even the most fervent of role-players will find it quite hard to care about Ancaria's fate - and will instead concentrate on killing more, bigger things in the pursuit of more, bigger weapons. The voice-acting and dialogue don't help matters. The translation from German may be grammatically correct, but it lacks character, texture or tone. Characters bark the same triumphs again and again, while the bizarre humour leaves you mystified. "Well done player!" says my Seraphim as I bring down a column of light to smite my foes. "I should have listened to my wife!" shouts the sixth kobold in about ten minutes as I slay him and look around angrily for his spouse. "I've lost my tickets to a Blind Guardian gig," explains a street urchin in a small rural town beset by the undead. Sadly Sacred 2 isn't the Monty Python-shaped pedestal of hilarity it wants to be, and in turn its tone is unbalanced.

Thankfully though, after a confusing introduction, character creation and development is extremely well thought out. You can tweak your character in every which way but loose - in baseline attributes, in combos, in combat arts, in weapons, in armour, in runes, in skills and in god-based super attacks. Should you want to hook up to a LAN or with up to sixteen people playing online, you're all bound to be distinct. The play area, meanwhile, is agreeably gigantic and the way it unfolds itself as you unlock save/spawn points and fast-travel portals happens at a neat lick. The ability to suck everything collectable in a three-metre radius into your magic satchel by pressing 'q' is also a neat labour-saving device ala Fable.

Beyond this and the collect-n-kill mentality, however, it never feels deeply rooted - troubled by woolly storytelling and daft moments of gameplay and (post-patch) bugs. When someone is following around after you pick up a protection quest, for example, why can't you tell them to go away? People trail around behind you, completely lacking in AI beyond running in the wrong direction when wolves attack, and there's no way of telling them to bugger off if you decide to do something else.

Also, the map bugs mean the game is an outright pain to navigate - not least because of the frequent rocks, cliffs and walls that cause all manner of backtracking, even when you suspect an able-bodied adventurer would be able to get over the shoulder-height ones with no difficulty. The occasional graphical glitches and unexpected crash to desktop don't help matters either. All the problems upset the delicate balance - so much so that even the key-map section of the instruction manual was wrong before and needs to be heavily amended by the patch notes.