For us everyday folk the only two certainties in life are death and taxes, but if you're a developer working on a role-playing game, you can add a third certainty: that someone, somewhere, at some time will compare your game to Diablo. It must be both flattering and frustrating to be likened to one of the greatest action-RPGs ever made even as it hobbles off into retirement, and the only saving grace is that Diablo 3 will also be compared to its parents, probably unfavourably!

But the fact of the matter is that if you're working on what those in the know call a "hack'n'slash RPG”, you're going to be compared to Diablo, and you'll probably deserve it, since you no doubt played the game and were inspired by it to no end. Still, carving out a niche for yourself and becoming more than just another "Diablo-clone” is a tall order that few games can accomplish; Titan Quest, Baldur's Gate Dark Alliance, Divine Divinity and Sacred are all that spring to mind. Both Divine Divinity and Sacred have done well enough to warrant sequels, and both are due to face off on consoles in 2009.

For those of you who didn't play Sacred on PC when it came out back in 2004, you missed out on an eccentric action-RPG that played a lot like Diablo, but rather than fighting in dank dungeons or small open-world environments, Sacred dropped you in a massive open-world and said "go nuts!” It was a well received feature, and as result the sequel takes this to the extreme, presenting a game world large enough that it would take you at least an hour or two to walk from one end to the other.

Unlike most modern games that like to hold your hand and mollycoddle you, Sacred 2 is one of those perverse European offerings that rips your training wheels off right out of the gate and then pushes you down a really steep hill. Regardless which of the game's unusual character classes you play, you'll be presented with a quick introduction, given the main story quest, and then just pretty much left to your own devices. It brings to mind playing the Elder Scrolls: Morrowind for the first time on the original Xbox; a sense of total freedom, and no idea what you're supposed to do with it.

Because just like Morrowind, this game is truly massive. Ridiculously huge, both geographically and in scope. After 40+ hours of gameplay, our Seraphim had stabbed and slogged through about 50% of the storyline, about a quarter of the side-missions and had explored only a fraction of the map. Sacred 2 is not a game for the impatient or the time poor: you have been warned!

The storyline of Sacred 2 is an interesting beast, because it shifts depending not only on which character class you play, but also whether you opt for a light or dark campaign. At its most basic level, the story revolves around some magical force called T-Energy which is the source of all mystical mojo in the world of Ancaria. The high-elves are engaged in some sort of civil war, and while they're busy with the Bürgerkrieg, the humans and orcs and everyone else decides it might be a good time to kick off some killing of their own. This may sound like a somewhat glib assessment of the game's plot, but the truth is most of the time you won't actually know a whole lot more than this. The main story quest is stretched far too thin and strings you across the entire continent with tenuously connected quests and little context for why you're doing them.

In fact it's fair to say that the class-specific quests tend to be a lot better designed than the main storyline, indeed, the character types are one of the highlights of Sacred 2. Eschewing your traditional warrior and wizard archetypes, Sacred 2 goes in a very different direction, with a class of battle-angels called Seraphim, a mechanical sentry modeled on the Egyptian god Anubis called a Temple Guardian, and a bunch of other classes in between. Each has very distinct strengths and weaknesses, and each has its own set of class-specific quests that tell a very different story for each of the playable character types. Coupled with the fact that some classes can only choose the light or dark campaign, and you have a wealth of options right from the character creation screen.

This is only the beginning however; Sacred 2 features one of the most flexible and varied character development systems around. Each class has a set of specific combat arts that apply to their unique spells or abilities, but in addition to this, there is also a massive pool of generic abilities like sword specialisation or skill at horse riding. Not every class has access to the same generic abilities however; rather they can only choose ones that would be useful to them. There are dozens and dozens of these abilities, but each character can only have 15; you start with only a few and more slots unlock as you advance in level.

It's not quite this simple though, since each time you level up you'll be given points to allocate to any of the skills you've chosen, further enhancing that skills ability. Armour specialisation, for example, confers a bonus to armour and allows you to use armour that is a higher level than your character. 1 skill point here might give you a 20% bonus and let you use armour one level above current, but dropping 10 points into the skill may bolster this to a 40% bonus and the ability to use items 3 levels above your character. The final kicker is that once you have 75 points in a skill, you earn a mastery of it that grants even more perks. Make no mistake: the character development in Sacred 2 is surprisingly deep.

This depth is slightly incongruous given how simple the combat is. Press A to attack stuff, and bind your spells and abilities to X, Y and B for when pressing A is taking too long to get the job done. It's a testament to the game that the controls can be boiled down so easily – Ascaron has done a phenomenal job of adapting the PC experience to the console, somehow making it feel more natural on the controller than it does with a keyboard and mouse. Holding down the a trigger allows for access to a second set of abilities with can be mapped to the face buttons, so at any time you can have 12 of your spells ready to fly – that's even more than the PC purists get on their 0-9 keys, for those keeping count. Not only that, the D-pad is user-definable for potions as well, so your healing draughts don't need to take up one of those precious slots either.

So the controls are a breeze, and the combat itself is also very straightforward. Most of your battles will be fought against pretty weak enemies that congregate in large groups, so it's just a matter of wading in and using your basic attack and a few abilities. These groups often have a leader though, who shows up differently on your mini-map so you know you'll be facing off against a tougher foe. Occasionally you'll also fight some pretty massive boss enemies, during which the camera usually fixes position zoomed out and helpful information like the bosses strengths and weaknesses show up on the screen. Better yet the game has done away with mana for spells and such, instead using a cooldown system similar to what you have in World of Warcraft; once you use an ability it takes anywhere from a few seconds to a minute or two to recharge. Abilities can raise or lower this cooldown time, so it all becomes part of the balancing act.

All in all the combat is simple and satisfying, with the only real issue being just how much of it there is. Of course you expect there to be quite a bit in a game like this, but it seems like Sacred 2 takes it a bit too far. This is especially true when you're trying to complete one of the game's hundreds of side quests which often involve trekking vast distances – having to fight twenty mobs of enemies on the way is fun at first, but after the first ten hours of gameplay it does begin to wear thin. It doesn't help that the enemies scale with your character level, so it's not even like they'll just be low-level junk you can defeat with a fierce stare...you can and will die if you get caught in the middle of a massive crush of enemies. Unless that crush is rats or kobolds, in which case you'll probably be fine!

Of course you can just run past them (which is even easier once you get a horse), but rendering dozens of enemies on the screen at a time takes a serious toll on the game's performance. Sacred 2 is a surprisingly good looking game given how vast and open the world is, but once you start getting 10-20 enemies on the screen at a time, the framerate takes a nosedive. Likewise in cities or other major settlements, the game will routinely lock the screen to prevent you advancing further while it struggles to load more of the environment.

There's no doubt this is a bit annoying, but on the whole it is offset by how impressive the game can look. Grass undulates in the breeze, shadows change depending on the time of day, and the spell effects are bright and bombastic. Given that you'll spend most of your time quite zoomed-out to get a bird's eye view, the developers could've gotten away with making the game look a lot worse, so it's kind of nice that that didn't take the easy road.

Of course it isn't all roses and rainbows – Sacred 2 is a pretty buggy game. For all its visual polish, there's a lot going wrong under the hood that goes beyond the aforementioned framerate issues and some jerky animation. Prior to a recent title update, the game was prone to deleting your savegame – potentially destroying dozens of hours of your playtime – as well as just randomly slowing down, and there's still a slew of bugs and glitches to be had. It's an easy thing to say that Ascaron should've focused on quality rather than vast quantity, but that doesn't make it any less true. Scaling down the game world to something smaller than Azeroth and focusing on making it run better would probably have elevated Sacred 2 into the lofty halls of "Classic.”

What is classic though is the game's dialogue and voice acting, which is a hilarious combination of intentional funniness married with bad translation and dodgy voiceovers. There are some genuinely funny lines in the game as well as all the unintentional ones, and it gives Sacred 2 a distinctly tongue-in-cheek feel. It's another of those things that you kind of wish the developer had spent more time on rather than making the game so goddamn massive, because humour and RPGs are not two concepts that come together very often.

The rest of the audio in the game is pretty good, but the music is the real highlight, blending rock riffs with an orchestral score that changes depending on where you are in the game world as well as whether you're in combat, not to mention which character you're playing. Not only that, but hair-metal band Blind Guardian provides some tunes, and even has a concert in the game that your character will constantly be told about during your sojourn. Hearing travelling minstrels playing Blind Guardian's theme-song for Sacred or your character warble it tunelessly is another of those quirky humorous touches that makes Sacred 2 so endearing.

Of course what you really want to know is how's the loot? It's half the reason we play games like this, and honestly, Sacred 2 is a bit hit and miss when it comes to the goodies. For some inexplicable reason, they've done away with the familiar Diablo/World of Warcraft colour-coding system that everyone is used to (and is also how they handle it on the PC version of Sacred 2, incidentally) and replaced it with gold stars. It doesn't make it immediately apparent whether something is better than something else though, because often a 2 star item will sell for more than a 3 star. There's a ridiculous amount of loot to be had in the game though, so if you're willing to sift through it all you'll find a ton of set pieces and unique weapons to make slaying foes easier.

Still, what makes slaying foes even easier is playing with others. So often we think of RPGs as a singleplayer experience unless they're an online game like World of Warcraft, but Sacred 2 kicks it old school Diablo-style and lets you party up with other adventurers – 2 players on the same console, or 4 players over Xbox Live. Local co-op is a nice addition for a friend to just jump in and slay some dragons and such before you both kick on for the night, but it isn't really designed for your mates to play through the whole game with you. It could be done, but sharing the same screen has a number of drawbacks as well as exacerbating gripes with the game in general – the camera is zoomed out pretty far, only one person can use the menu and inventory at a time, as well as a hit to performance.

Multiplayer over Xbox Live is another matter entirely; it's a full-featured experience that almost feels like an MMORPG at times...when the game is playable that is. Server problems, connection issues and lag have plagued a number of staff at XBW Australia, but when the game works, it's an awful lot of fun. There are some limitations in regards to what the level-gap can be between players, but on the whole when Sacred 2 is doing its thing as the developers intended, it's enough to make an old fella think back to the heady days of Diablo 2 and battle.net, hacking and slashing with your friends, looting, levelling and generally having a blast.