Multiplayer is a great way to experience Sacred 2 – co-op play via Xbox Live/PSN works well, and even makes travelling a snap by allowing you to teleport to another player with the press of a button. One caveat: you don’t play the co-op campaign as one game – the host’s game is the campaign you are playing. So, if Player 1 hosts a game then all of his/her quests will be in tact, whereas players who join will have no quests listed at all from their own campaigns. Basically the co-op game is just a way for the host to play his campaign with buddies and the other players earn experience and loot and that’s it – they do not progress in the campaign long term.

But that’s ok – the main quest is lengthy but the side quests, if you choose to do them, will keep you playing for a long, long time even if some of them are a bit low on the hero-priority list. You want me to break up a marriage? Save a cat? Find your pet mouse? Still, this is one long, meaty game despite some of the less than dramatic quests.

There are some problems, however. Load times can be annoying, but somewhat expected in such a huge setting. There are multiple quests which assign companions to you who you must deliver to a specific location – and your companions are idiots, running headlong into a mass of enemies without a care, and once they die, you fail that quest. And then there are the bugs.

In the 48 or so game hours I spent with Sacred 2, I suffered three hard lock ups, two nasty glitches that prevented my hero from moving until completely turning off the console and reloading, and several quests that were bugged and wouldn’t finish even though I had done all that was required. No game killers, (and there is an auto save) but there are enough stumbles in the game to be noticeable.

Still, Sacred 2 works. The interface is slick and easy to maneuver, the graphics solid, and the gameplay familiar and yet open enough to allow you to breathe a bit. Sure, the Diablo formula gets stale after a while, and this is no exception, but if the game does nothing else it proves that this genre fits in perfectly on the console—a pretty big achievement, really.