
It’s an odd oversight that sometimes makes the whole enterprise feel pointless. The worst that happens is that you might have to run back a few screen lengths to where you died. No experience point setback, no financial ding, no repair costs, no respawned monsters. One area where Victor Vran won’t push back is death. How do you feel about champions with special abilities to stress test the tactical interplay? Do you want monsters to have extra armor and regeneration? How about speeding them up? Basically, how much do you want the monsters to push back? Along the way, you get to decide what sort of experience point multiplier and magic find bonus you want. A potentially ugly power curve rises up near the end of the game, but that’s mainly because Victor Vran doesn’t have much of an endgame, so it needs to delay you on the way to the final boss. And like Diablo III, the degree of difficulty is mostly in your hands. The game constantly encourages you to play around with different builds, but if you just want to brute force your way with your favorite build, have at it. Like Diablo III, you can reconfigure your character - always and only the eponymous Victor Vran - at any time. “Also for them” if you aren’t.Īfter the jump, a cerebral action RPG for dummies. “Dumbed down” you might say if you’re impatient with people who don’t like to think when they’re playing an action RPG. Whereas Sacred 2 was fussy and elaborate, Victor Vran is accessible and splashy, brimming with personality and broad variety. But Victor Vran lives very comfortably in a post-Diablo III world. There’s enough wide-ranging intricacy in Victor Vran to warm the clockwork cockles of a Sacred 2 fan’s heart. Victor Vran, another German take on the Diablo formula, is actually Bulgarian, but close enough. Later, Path of Exile from New Zealand would come along to re-fill the niche with its Antipodean clockwork. Sacred 2 was an action RPG for gearheads. Then your Teutonic clockwork assemblage roamed around an open world, maybe following the main quest marker but maybe not.

You might have had to actually read a manual and take notes to know what you were doing (keep in mind this was back in 2008). In Sacred 2’s German variation on the Diablo formula, you assembled intricate character builds.

There are two kinds of people in the world: those who recognized the brilliance of Sacred 2 and those who don’t like to think when they’re playing an action RPG.
