Of all the genres in gaming, perhaps none has been less represented in the current console generation than the dungeon crawling action RPG.  Games like Marvel Ultimate Alliance and Too Human scratched the surface, but the next-gen systems still lack the equivalents of Champions of Norrath or Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance.  By porting their PC-only offering, Sacred 2: Fallen Angel, to the Xbox 360 and PS3, German developer Ascaron is hoping to fill that void.

Sacred 2: Fallen Angel is a dungeon crawler in the vein of Diablo, except that it features a massive, open world instead of a series of randomly generated dungeons.  One to four players can jump into the fantasy world of Ancaria to take on hordes of bandits, creatures and monsters, collect tons of weapons, armor and other loot, and build up their characters’ abilities through missions and side-quests.  Like any good dungeon crawler, all the armor and weapons that you collect change your character’s visual appearance as well as their stats, and these items can also be upgraded with different types of elemental effects, which also show up on screen.

One of the key elements of any good dungeon crawling action RPG is character creation.  Sacred 2 features six unique character types; the Dryad, or wood elf archer, the High Elf, a basic wizard class, the Shadow Warrior, with elements of the warrior and necromancer classes, the Seraphim, who are able to use melee, magic and technology skills, the Inquisitor, a pure necromancer, and the Temple Guardian, an odd character type with ranged and melee technological attacks.  While these classes offer a decent variety of play types, more customization of players’ skill sets would have been very welcome.  Furthermore, each class is tied to a gender, meaning that you can’t play with a female Shadow Warrior or a male High Elf.  This, along with extremely limited options for your character’s look (a few hair colors and two hair styles for most classes) makes it difficult to create a character that you’ll feel any connection to.

The instruction book for Sacred 2 presents a relatively interesting backstory.  The Seraphim once ruled all of Ancaria, until they entrusted the High Elves with the responsibility of guarding the world’s T-Energy, a miraculous substance responsible for all life and magic in the world.  The High Elves used the T-Energy to become the dominant culture of Ancaria, alienating the Humans, Dragons, Temple Guardians, Orcs, and even many conscientious High Elves.  This led to a great war, which, despite the High Elves victory, resulted in the ruination of Ancaria.  Now, with the world splintered, war is again on the horizon, and it’s up to you to decide whether order is restored to Ancaria, or if the land will be plunged into the darkness of war again.

As cool as that all sounds, the actual in-game story is trite, poorly presented and completely forgettable.  Awful German-to-English translations and laughable voice work don’t help things any, but even if the acting and script were stronger, the plot would still fall short of interesting.  NPCs, towns and missions suffer from the same general malaise.  There’s nothing specifically wrong with any of them, they just feel underdeveloped and canned, as if they were the default entries in an RPG Maker game.

Coming from the PC, Sacred 2 features a combat system quite unlike any other console dungeon crawler.  The face buttons can be mapped to whatever weapon, spell, item, or combat art the player chooses.  Holding the left or right trigger will bring up separate menus of attacks, allowing players 12 on-the-fly abilities at any given time.  Abilities can also be linked together to form combos, which can be mapped as unique attacks to any of the face buttons.  The system allows for excellent customization of your character, but can be a bit confusing at first.  Sadly, bringing these attacks to bear can be something of a disappointment.  Controls are often unresponsive, leading to plenty of frustrating deaths that should have been avoidable.  Also, while there are plenty of eye-catching magical abilities and strategic melee maneuvers, attacking your opponents, especially with melee weapons, feels empty.  Enemies barely react to your successful strikes, and a lack of decent sound effects make the whole affair feel somewhat insubstantial.  Instead of smashing barrels and crates, you approach them and press a button to open them, which is followed by an animation of the crate or barrel falling apart. It may seem like a small thing, but this accents the existing feeling of weightlessness.   Ranged fighting fares somewhat better, but the actual act of combat is not Sacred 2’s strong suit by any means.

The PC version of Sacred 2 was released in November of last year, but based on the graphics, one might assume it came out well before that.  The game utilizes a slightly overly saturated color palette that places the game squarely between cartoonish and realistic, as far as visual style goes.  The problem is that this leaves the game with no real visual identity.  Mediocre character models, problematic level designs and sloppy animations make things even worse, but what’s most troublesome about the game’s visual presentation is the frame rate, which dips into the mid-teens of frames per second whenever more than 5 or 6 characters are visible on-screen.  When playing with three friends online, this, obviously, presents a major problem.  There are also constant screen tears, shimmery shadows, and a slew of other graphical pops and quirks that illustrate the unpolished nature of the port.

Despite its many imperfections, Sacred 2: Fallen Angel is a surprisingly addictive action RPG.  There are tons of cool-looking and effective items to collect and modify, extremely deep character customization allows you to play one character class in myriad different ways, and the massive open-world encourages and rewards extensive exploration.  It’s a shame that the script, plot, voice acting are graphics below par, because there are some really good ideas at work here, including a beautifully implemented menu system that is, by all accounts, superior to the PC version’s, a perfect mini-map system, unique mounts for each class, and some interesting magical and combat abilities.  It’s deeply flawed, but there’s still a good amount of fun to be had over the thirty hour campaign, and for dungeon crawling fans, it’s one of the best options on consoles.