Sacrifice

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. 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? Sacrifice. $6. Buy it. Play it.

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. 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! Buy it!

Play a sorcerer on desolate floating islands of 5 different gods performing many missions. The developers must have been trying to cram as many genres as possible into this game. An early attempt at 3D RTS, Sacrifice was an ambitious hybrid of action, combat, fantasy, RTS and other gaming genre elements all wrapped in third person perspective. A complex game with a steep learning curve plus unique game mechanics requiring patience and persistence to master. Sacrifice has only 3 very basic tutorials, so for extra training play the 1st mission of each god. Your main most frequent goal is the unsavory and very old testament activity of desecrating opponents alters via sacrificing your own on enemy alters. Thus destroying enemy abilities to regenerate. With NO DIFFICULTY SETTING choose carefully which god served in each mission. As you progress you will please some gods but anger others, limiting choices later. Combining strong narrative with all the other genres floating around gives a slight adventure element. Interface is a bit awkward and takes getting used to. Period 3D graphix are a matter of taste altho Sacrifice does well with a colourful and almost arthouse feel to visuals. Atmospheric synthesizer-orchestral soundtrack, quality sound fx and voice acting raise the general gaming experience. Single player campaign mode alone has over 40 parts plus built-in scenario creation tools give Sacrifice high replay ability for those who can survive abseiling a sheer cliff learning curve. This cliff may have caused cult status instead of the hit now defunct Southern Californian Shiny Entertainment no doubt hoped Sacrifice would be. Amongst other interface issues, zoom is very limited. It’s not possible to zoom out far enough to see all your units during combat, including aerial units. There’s NO SPEED ADJUSTMENT in the game - a bit odd for an RTS. But Sacrifice is an odd game! However, large amounts of patience and endurance can reward you with fun gaming. Rating 63%

It is a testament to the quality of Sacrifice that you can still install it on today's computers and it will not only run, it will run well. The graphics, while dated, are still pleasing to the eye, the gameplay is still fun while being challenging, and as for replayability, this title is bursting with it. Sacrifice uses an over-the-shoulder camera with limited zoom. Today's players might feel a bit limited, at first, but the fact is that the camera angle covers everything you would want and need to see during play. At times, you will want to pull back, to view everything in the near vicinity, and at other times, you will need to be up close and personal. A first-person view of the panoramic scenery is not necessary (although you'll be tempted to use a screenshot for your desktop wallpaper), so it is not included as an option. Nor is pulling so far back that you can't see what's going on. Like so much else in this game, the developers give you exactly what is needed for an excellent gaming experience. Make no mistake, this is an "old skool" game, and the difficulty ramps up, quickly. Just as your companion and advisor, Zzyzzyx, is beginning to annoy you with his free advice, you find yourself being blasted to pieces by enemy wizards and wishing he had survival tips for you. No such luck, however. You'll have to figure out winning strategies and tactics on your own. Players who are used to cheat codes and walk-throughs may not have the patience to succeed, but those who persevere and try alternative methods will surely find one of the many paths to victory. Just how many paths there are to victory may surprise you. It is possible to "beat" the single player campaign while sticking to any of the five gods' mission tracks, but you are not limited to only one. There is nothing preventing you from fighting for Persephone for your first mission, James for your second mission, and Stratos for your third. As you continue to favor particular gods, their opponents will become less and less open to accepting your service, but you are not limited to a particular path until late in the game. Which path that happens to be will depend upon what you have done, previously. If you are slaughtering Pyro's minions and razing his buildings to the ground during the first half of the game, you won't be earning favors from him, later. The spells you learn, the creatures you can summon, and the blessings you receive for a job well done, all of these are determined by which god you've hired yourself out to for that mission. That adds an edge of mercenary calculation to your choice of missions. Help Persephone and gain Dragon summoning? Or help Pyro and learn to cast Volcano? It is this mixing and matching which gives the game its longevity. Different combinations of spells and summoned creatures require different tactics and strategy to win. Some nay-sayers may claim otherwise, but it IS possible to "beat" the game with almost any combination of powers. Where Sacrifice really shines, however, is in multiplayer. The computer-controlled opponents may have some advantages over you, but you haven't really been challenged until you've gone up against an opponent as devious as you are. The effort required to connect to other players is really the only major drawback to an otherwise excellent game, but the guys at "Good Old Games" may have made adjustments, there. I wouldn't know as I still use my original Sacrifice CD. What I do know is that there were few things as fun as the dust-raising, spell-flinging, chaotic cloud of summoned carnage which was multiplayer Sacrifice. Assuming you could find other people to play with, a multiplayer game of Sacrifice offered almost unlimited fun. If you've never played Sacrifice, I highly recommend you give it a try. If you tried it but got discouraged, I suggest you look on YouTube for some examples of how to "stomp the comp." If you're one of those people that remembers the game fondly, here's your chance to snag a "modern update" to a great game for only $5.99. Even at ten times that price, Sacrifice would be a game worth owning.