Sacred 2: Remaster - An Inexcusably Terrible Mess (Review)

Sacred 2 - Remaster

Released: November 11th, 2025

Developer: SparklingBit, Funatics Software GmbH, Nukklear

Publisher: THQ Nordic

Systems: PC, PS5 (reviewed), Xbox Series X/S

Sacred 2: Remaster invites us into an abject nightmare.

The world is in tatters, its inhabitants gripped by madness and the furniture to which they might be forever bound. Blacksmiths watch in helpless silence as their identical clones erratically run around them in presumed existential terror. Horses slide along city streets with a deafening, baleful, cacophony of clattering. Flesh melds to flesh, solid objects blink out of existence, the very foundations of physical space are unstable. It’s as if reality itself is having a manic episode.

What the fuck happened to this game?

Jesus Christ.

I have fond memories of Sacred 2. Like many people, my attention was grabbed by its amazingly camp collaboration with the band Blind Guardian, whose CGI “concert” is still a beautiful piece of late 2000s nonsense. While far from polished, the final game provided some fun (and shamelessly dumb) RPG chaos. It was classic jank, long before such a term took on an affectionate meaning. 

The remaster is not classic jank, it is a defecating shambles. I don’t remember it being anywhere near this bad. Did my brain simply erase all the parts that were broken beyond belief, or has Sacred 2 been violently broken over the knees of those claiming to have improved it? It almost doesn’t matter, because this release is unacceptable either way. 

My return to Ancaria immediately began on the wrong foot, and I literally mean my character’s feet were wrong. Not just the feet, but both legs were a shattered mess, one being almost totally static while the other tried to drag the rest of the body forward with a brutal juddering. My horse had it worse, all four of its limbs spasming like they were out of fucking Jacob’s Ladder. 

A patch came out that appeared to fix this. It did not fix the problem of every single merchant - and many random NPCs - having a duplicate of themself that behaved erratically. It didn’t stop quests being impossible to turn in because objectives had vanished or couldn’t be interacted with. While my Seraphim’s legs were fixed, she still had framerate dips that were specific to her and her alone. 

This is an actual, unaltered screenshot.

Massive white rectangles sometimes manifest to cover up significant portions of the screen. I once couldn’t sell any single piece of loot without it disabling access to the rest of my inventory. Attempting to map abilities might cause their icons to become trapped onscreen and remain plastered there after I close the menus. Speaking of menus, merely scrolling the sound settings mutes the whole game. There are random audio tics that rattle with an uncomfortable frequency and horrendous volume. It’s laggy, unresponsive, and fucking fragile. 

Combat Arts have a mind of their own. Sometimes my hero’s cooldown abilities will spontaneously activate at random, other times they’ll trigger a different ability than what’s selected, and occasionally they’ll stop working altogether. Any facet of combat can just cease functionality because not a single part of bloody anything is up to code.    

All that I’ve mentioned is a mere portion of the technical anarchy on display. Bugs aren’t just regular occurrences, they are relentless occurrences, an onslaught of breakages that range from laughable to maddening. Almost every time I’ve loaded the game, a brand new glitch has presented itself within moments, as if the very act of booting this thing up will shatter it in some new and fantastic way.  

Do I even need to mention it’s prone to crashing? Yes I do, because I’ve lost a fuckton of playtime thanks to every fucking shutdown. I’ve barely had a session that didn’t end with a crash, and after ADHD’ing out and forgetting to save at least an hour of progress, I’m fucking done with this shit. The entire remaster is held together by little more than sellotape and optimism.

I remember when this game was good.

While I may sound quite angry about all this, my biggest emotional reaction is a low key sadness. I’m not cut up about it, but I’m still somewhat dejected that I can’t just talk about a game for which I have a particular nostalgia, one that coincided with some of the biggest events of my personal life. 

When I first wrote about Blind Guardian’s music video for Destructoid, I was living at my grandmother’s house in Kent. When I reviewed Sacred 2 for Destructoid, I was living in the middle of Buttfuck Mississippi. To say Sacred 2 is tied to very particular - and nowadays surreal - personal memories is to put it mildly. It evokes strong memories of a different time… and a far better version of this damn game. 

Squat stuff.

How poignant it would be to reminisce, but instead I have to talk about what a grotesque shitshank this thing is. I almost refuse to believe it was actually remastered. It’s upscaled, I can see that, but it’s in such disrepair and so lacking in modernization that I have to question the level of work that’s gone into it. About the only truly notable change is the UI, but that’s because they’ve made it worse. It’s uglier, messier, and it’s totally asinine. 

In an active design choice that would have required effort, Sacred 2: Remaster is purposefully less functional than Sacred 2 was. Quick slots for potions and abilities have been reduced, limiting your access to important stuff. The developers’ inane reason for this is to force players into “thinking” about their choices, but all I can think about is their choices and how preposterous they are. 

The space gun is called the BeeEffGee. No, really.

It’s somewhat astounding that the remaster refuses to add legitimate quality-of-life improvements and mod cons such as respec options. I’ve seen it argued that such things would “cheapen” the hardcore experience, which is hilarious since the game is actually quite a casual and breezy take on the RPG genre. Arbitrarily retaining clunky and outdated systems does not a “hardcore” game make. 

By Jesus’ rigid nipples though, the menus are an absolute mess to navigate even without the many interface glitches that make using them twice as brutal. They’re sloppy, they’re slow, and did I mention they’re riddled with their own bespoke glitches? Every single aspect of this game comes with its own suite of unique fuckups. If it was this bad back in the day - and it wasn’t  - there’s no excuse for how unfixed it is over fifteen years later.  

Dress like an explosion at a fashion show.

What a shame. Even through a thick miasma of ineptitude, the fun of a very silly action RPG can still be witnessed. It’s as simple as such games could ever be, just letting you loose into a decently sized world where enemies parade around with neither rhyme nor reason, ready to be slain in droves. A steady stream of XP and loot is spewed all over you, and you don’t ever have to give a fuck about why anything’s happening because it’s all too stupid to matter. Like I said, it’s breezy stuff, and I mean that as a compliment. 

Sacred 2 is full of absolutely dumb humor, which I like. Awful dad jokes are attached to bits of scenery, the fourth wall is heavily leaned on, a dying Kobold claims they know where the player parked their car. That whole Blind Guardian bit is fully committed to, as NPCs sing lines from the song and the band itself appears in the game. The voice acting is bad in a way that feels neither deliberate nor accidental, like they couldn’t get high quality actors but had fun with it anyway.

Look, Sacred 2 is not a very good game, even at its best. It is a charming product of its time, however, and it’s so boldly straightforward in its approach to hack n’ slash adventuring that it’s almost refreshing. In a medium now ruled by grinding and paywalls, it’s nice to play a relic that messily hurls constant progress at you. At least, it would be nice if the remaster wasn’t such a shambles. 

Never clone alone.

I take no pleasure in admonishing this remaster. Sacred 2 occupies a small but precious space in my heart, and I’m shocked to see how disastrously this has turned out. There’s still fun to be salvaged from the wreckage, but I can’t ignore the fact that Sacred 2: Remaster qualifies as a defective product. I have so many questions about how this came out in the state it’s in, but one query stands above them all. 

Is nothing Sacred?

2/10