Sacrifice

Sacrifice has a deep and inspired story, unique gameplay, and a staggering amount of style. One of the best examples of the signature Shiny blend of original style with uncanny comedy. Plus Eartworm Jim appears in this game as a God. Definitely one of my all time favorite games.

This is a colorful, fun game with excellent voice acting and characterization of the gods you serve and the troops you command. But I have one major complaint: this game is *really* difficult! On some of the available campaigns, things get really rough really quickly, and the style of gameplay is such that the CPU is going to be a lot better at multitasking than you. As much as I wanted to keep playing this game, it was starting to get absurdly hard, so I had to set it aside lest I tear my hair out. Enjoy, but good luck!

I picked this up long ago and I still remember it as one of the funnest games I've played. I view the game as a Magic the Gathering video game that works. I say this as it has five gods with their own pros and cons, with unique spells and elite units, but you as a character have no direct interaction with anything outside of spells and units commanded (i.e. no manaless/melee attack) The game as a lot of replay value as with every level the gods will team up or draw battle lines based off of which you one(s) you've been working for, and are free to choose which one to work for (your next level) and thus customize your spell and unit lists.

Dispite this being one of the best games I've never heard of, I actually had to play it on my wife's old labtop rather then my gaming tower; let me explain. This game has major technical issues that arn't really addressed well because its not old enough to run in a DOS BOX type emmulator, yet too old to work well with newer hardware. There is a well known issue (this is sold on steam too, and they have the same problem) where if you are running windows 7 and have a NVIDIA card that is anything but outdated, you'll have so many graphical glitches the game will either crash, or be rendered unplayable. There is no fix for this, you are just F'ed. In fact I can't even tell you what multiplayer is like, because I still havn't found a way to get that particular part of the game to not crash. Oddly enough those with ATI cards don't seem to have near as many problems, and neither do people running this game on older systems. That major flaw aside, the game itself is really good. I found the gameplay very similar to a Third person platform version of Warcraft 3, where you find yourself skirmishing with your opponent to gain the advantage before committing your forces for victory. For those who don't know what i'm talking about, this makes for a very action oriented, yet still very strategic, game. A single player play through is short, but there are so many scenarios that you pick from that you can play through a few times and still only go through half of them. So all and all, its a great game for less than the cost of a trip to burger king- provided you can make it work.

No, it's Sacrifice! I strongly feel that this game tries to do too many things, and pulls each one off quite well, but not as well as they could have been. I find the HUD to be a bit awkward to use, the combat to be a bit tame, and the movement speed of the protagonist to be too slow. All in all, it's fun, but in short bursts.