The Holy War is over. The demons of Gologotha have been banished, yet the cost has been terribly high. The Creator, god of the Fyllid, has been defeated and the faith of the people has begun to wane. Petty squabbles among the five remaining gods has caused the land to split into five mystical territories - each at war with one another. Into this divided land steps a wizard, a man haunted by his past, whose choices will shape the future.
Which god will he choose? Will he sacrifice himself to change this world for the better, or will what remains of this world be sacrificed for one god's glory?
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Take a journey behind-the-scenes of one of David Perry's favourite games with the Sacrifice editorial.
Sacrifice includes the Scapex Editor.
This game has been patched to the latest official version: 0678.05.21
Multiplayer notice: multiplayer mode is available after registering your unique CD-key for the game. For details click here.
Age requirements: ESRB Mature (Animated Blood, Animated Violence)
Minimum system requirements: Windows XP or Windows Vista, 1 GHz Processor (1.4 GHz recommended), 256MB RAM (512 recommended), 3D graphics card compatible with DirectX 7 (compatible with DirectX 9 recommended), Mouse, Keyboard.
Ever wanted to be a powerful wizard? Summon creatures out of thin air, create buildings with just a few words? Hit your „friend” with a lighting bolt or a cow falling form the sky? Well now it is possible! I remember having a lot of fun playing this game back shortly after its release. I approached it again with some doubts and I was surprised how good it still is! Sacrifice... full review boasts an interesting plot, funny dialogues (especially between gods) and quite a few plot twists! You are a wizard who escaped from his/her own dimension to another world – a world where five gods are fighting for domination. you will have to choose your employer. This will influence the spells at your disposal and the monster you can summon. Multiple spellbook possibilities guarantee that You will come back to this game many times just to checking out the different monsters and spells.
From the gameplay's point of view Sacrifice aged only a little. You move your wizard with WASD (no jumping) and the camera angle is fixed to your character's position. Summoning is straightforward and you can bind various spells to appropriate keys. Ordering your troops to use a a specific formation is intuitive, but marking your units if they already are in formation and guarding you is a pain. Sometimes ordering them to attack a moving target is a little frustrating as well, but only a little. These are only reasons why I'm giving this game 4 not 5.
Now the graphics. When Sacrifice first came out they were astonishing. Now, after almost 8 years, you can see that this game is old. Still they look like they came from 2002, not 2000.
Overall Sacrifice is a great game with a high replayability rate. It's definitely a valuable addition to the Good Old Games catalog. With visuals which are a little bit old and a unique gameplay experience you're in for a lot of fun.
Sacrifice isn't an "ordinary" run of the mill game. It's setting alone has probably turned away many potential players since it's not the "standard" Orks and Elves fantasy setting! But that is what's so great about Sacrifice, it's like playing a Tim Burtonesque game filled with interesting characters and area's.... full review
The story itself is great, it's fantastically voiced by a cast of superb voice actors. From the sarcastic familiar that becomes your advisor to your arch enemy Marduk (voiced superbly by the late Tony Jay!). Not to mention the perfect voicing of the main character.
The game itself plays out as an RTS where you, as the commander, take part of the battle. Summoning buildings and creatures to fight for you. The "currency" of the game is Souls and Mana. You gain mana by building Monoliths on Manafountains while summoning creatures called Manahoars will transfer this mana to you on the field. You'll also need "Souls" in order to summon creatures. They can be gained from killing living things and taking their soul.
This introduces a large part of why the game is so vicously hard sometimes. Neutral and "allied" souls are blue which you can pick up and use while the souls of enemy creatures are red. After killing an enemy you will need to summon wicked looking "nurses" in order to suck out the souls using giant syringes. They will then sacrifice the souls at your altar so they get added to your pool!
The reason why this makes the game is so hard is because the importance of the first skirmish you have is paramount since you can gain or lose alot of souls right then and there!
Aside from the difficuly, the great graphics, superb music and voice overs , interesting story and gameplay will keep you playing! I wish I could give more than five stars on this one!
Sacrifice is one of those games that makes you long for the golden days of yore, when a major company could produce something so out of the mainstream that it creates its own genre. ... full review
Art:
The art direction in Sacrifice is sublime. This is not a squeeky-clean high fantasy world of fair elves and hardy dwarves. In this game, creatures range from pathetic to grotesque, and even the "good" guys look absolutely monstrous. The game does suffer from from low-resolution (by today's standards) textures which mask the otherwise brilliant creature design- check out some of the extras for some absolutely stellar concept art- but each land has its own feel, and spell effects are at times completely awe-inspiring. The game does lean towards the macabre and disturbing, which may put off some players, but I found that it enhances the game's themes quite nicely.
Summary: Dark, twisted, macabre - and brilliant. Although high-resolution textures and models would add alot, there is plenty of eye-candy to satiate even a modern gamer. 9/10
Sound:
While the majority of the sound is high quality, Sacrifice benefits most from some incredible voice work. All of the units have distinctive voices, some are genuinely funny, and none really reach the point of being incredibly grating, which is a blessing. The Gods are universally excellent, which the voice actors creating truly interesting personalities Sound effects provide good aural cues, and the music is quite nice. One issue I notice is that during a chaotic battle, sound cues can overlap and become rather confusing.
Summary: Tim Curry voices Stratos - and the other voice actors are all up to his level, That really should say it all. I do have to subtract a point for the occasionally chaotic soundscape, though. 9/10
Themes:
Nobody is pure in this game, from the goddess of Life to your character. Your wizard is responsible for the destruction of his entire world, and in fact is running away from his deeds. While Charnel and Pyro are the most blatantly evil gods, Persephone employs some creatures that are damn effective nightmare fuel and has a slight tyrannical streak. There's betrayal, Gods who can't put aside their bickering even to stave off the destruction of the world, an almost amoral protagonist, and hordes of little people who get slaughtered due to the whims of the Gods. The story is dark, intriguing, and affected by a player's decisions throughout the game.
Summary: A dark, complex game, with an interesting story and characters. 10/10
Gameplay:
So Sacrifice is a gorgeous game that treats its audience intelligently and has stellar voice acting. That's all well and good, but how does it play?
Wonderfully.
Sacrifice is a near-perfect blend of action and strategy. Your point of view is fixed around your wizard, whom you use to cast spells, summon creatures, and create manaliths. You have three main resources- health, mana, and souls. Health is your wizard's health. When it is gone, your wizard is "killed" and takes on a ghostly form that cannot summon, attack, or reclaim souls until it can regenerate by a mana source. Mana is used to perform almost any action, from casting spells to summoning, and souls are required in order to summon creatures. Lesser creatures only require one, while more powerful ones can take up to five. When a creature is killed, it drops the souls used in its creation to be reclaimed or captured by another player. Gameplay revolves around controlling mana sources, building manaliths on top of them to secure your position, with the eventual goal of desecrating an enemy's altar in order to banish them and defeat them. Players attempt to gather more souls by killing off enemy creatures and converting them with a spell. However, a wizard need only touch the soul of one of his own creatures to reclaim it, so the only way to effectively gather souls is to kill the wizard off early.
Thus you have several goals and resources to balance: Do I use the Guardian spell to tether some of my units to manaliths, greatly increasing their defense but lowering the amount of souls available to my attack force? Do I focus fire on the Wizard and try to collect the souls of his creatures, or try and wipe out his force quickly enough that I can press the attack before he has a chance to recover? The fact that you can mix and match different units from different gods creates nearly limitless playstyles and possibilities, and it's all done in real time. A good game of Sacrifice has lots of back and forth, with each player seizing advantages and rallying their forces until one finally gains the upper hand.
Sacrifice can be challenging at first, but playing through the campaign gives you a fairly good introduction and training. It can be difficult to balance controlling your creatures and your avatar at first, and it doesn't help that Sacrifice is so different from almost any other game. Creating custom key bindings goes a long way towards alleviating the issue, as does becoming familiar with the brilliant gesture system.
One limitation, stemming from the fact that your view is tied to your avatar, is that it is harder to launch multi-front attacks. Since your opponent has the same difficulty, it's not that big of a deal.
Summary: Like nothing you've ever played. Intense, strategic, and frantic, Sacrifice takes a bit to get used to but is completely worth every minute. 10/10
Replayability:
Single player has multiple branching plotlines, depending on who you serve, but taking different paths also has a tangible effect on multiplayer: Each time you complete the singleplayer game, you get a "Spellbook" for multiplayer that contains all the spells and creatures your wizard used. Thus, it's possible to mix and match the units and spells of different gods to suit your tastes. Some combinations are not available, due to the fact that certain gods stop giving you missions later in the game due to the storyline, but a bewildering amount are still present. This provides an absolutely ridiculous amount of variety in multiplayer, and wonderful replayability.
Summary: Quite a bit. The gameplay remains largely the same, but the variety in the units you face is quite nice. 8/10
So what happens when you combine fantastic visuals, inspired art direction, solid gameplay, brilliant multiplayer, some kickass voice acting and tie it all together with some stellar production values?
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Bobbicus)