Sacred 2 - Previews @ GameShark and Gaming Nexus

Two new previews of Sacred 2 are online, at GameShark and GamingNexus.  Here's a bit from the first, where the writer presumably hasn't spent much time with hack'n'slash action/RPGs:

One of the first things that jumped out at me is the method in which your character is controlled. For some reason developer Ascaron eschewed the familiar WASD keys in favor of the mouse. To navigate your character you must constantly hold down the left mouse button and drag the mouse in whatever direction you want to move. It felt odd for my left hand to sit idly by while my right hand did all the work. Even after an hour of playing, I never really got used to it. I also wasn’t too crazy by the limited capabilities of the camera. Yes, you can zoom in and out, but you can’t zoom in to first person point-of-view, nor can you tilt the camera’s angle. It's not a deal breaker, but just a bit odd.

...and the second:

In this 2,000-years-before-the-original prequel, I roam across the Caribbean blue coastlines of the High Elf region, grittier stone-stacked Human lands, marshlands, deserts, jungles, and wastelands. I climb the crystal-sparkling towers of the Seraphim, the pyramidal ziggurats of the Dryads, and the snow-less tundra that the Orcs call home. The landscapes are as varied as the dramatis personae, but erring more on the side of realism. And as my Shadow Warrior slays his way from corner to corner of the myriad countrysides, he also paces through intricately-detailed towns, well-populated capitol cities, and lonely farmsteads. And never once did I have a load screen impede my progress. The exploration is seamless, free-form, and hundreds-of-hours big.