If you’re thinking Diablo with a dash of mordant humor and a smidge more character development, you’ll be getting close to the clicking compulsion that is Sacred, but you’d be overlooking all the design and development that Team Ascaron must’ve done to keep the game this fizzy --- in spite of the six character classes, the 20-odd skill trees, the four difficulty levels, the humongous map and the hundreds of NPCs and baddies just waiting out there to jump down your hauberk. It makes sense that Ascaron’s previous titles have been fairly involved sim-strategy titles like Patrician and Port Royale: These guys clearly enjoy trying to make complex simulations look easy, and with Sacred, they’ve succeeded beyond even their own large imaginings.

The game looks and sounds extraordinarily well too, though there’s nothing here that can double as a vidcard benchmarker; it’s just consistent, charming, funny and utterly charming. The artwork and voice acting are more than acceptable, and the game makes good use of multichannel audio with babbling brooks, far-off cries of beasties and weather effects. Rarely do all the disparate elements of a hack ‘n’ slash RPG come together in as seamless a way as they do in Sacred.​