Sacrifice

"A beautiful pearl locked within a dirty oyster."

Introduction
In Sacrifice, you play a wizard who has traveled through the astral void and has become lost. He seeks protection from evil by asking the gods for help. They accept, as long as he is prepared to risk his life to fight for them... and so the story begins. Be prepared to go through hell to finish it.

Gameplay: 8
The thing I enjoyed most about playing Sacrifice was the way that I was unable to relate this to any other game I had ever played. It was also hard to classify a genre for it, until I looked at the game info. You controlled units, right. Was it a Real Time Strategy? No. You could attack and cast spells. Was it an RPG? No. It was a mixture of both gaming elements.

The basic gameplay is that you have a few souls in your soul well, and you draw them from the well and cast spells on them to turn them into a wide variety of abominations. You then charge into the other player's creatures, and have a massive battle. If you win, you can take the other player's creature should and build an even more powerful army. You desecrate the other wizards altar and kill him. There is a lot more to the gameplay here, but I don't have enough time to list every single detail. Good stuff. :)

Graphics: 9
The graphics here were amusing and funny, and yet still very good. Every single thing in this game must have taken quite a while to perfect.

Level Design
What shocked me when I was playing through my game for the first time was the sheer vastness of the levels. They seemed to span for miles around you, which made it a nice challenge thwarting your enemy's plans as he tries to sneak over to your altar. This way you have to balance out offense and defense to protect yourself.

Creature/Character Models
The creature and character models were designed just as well as the levels. The creatures themselves looked almost exactly like you would imagine if you had only heard the name. They look almost... Shiny :)

Sound: 7
Sacrifice does not fall short here, though the sounds were far from perfect. Each different creature has its own voice and says different things when you give it commands or it dies. There are also different sounds for spells and things. Everything you would expect from a decent game, nothing more, nothing less.

Story/Plot: 10
Shiny finally hit the ball on the head and produced a game that has good combat scenes and graphics, yet the still squeeze a story in. The reason I gave the story such a high score is because you can do missions for other gods and completely change the course of the war. You can then replay the game and see this from the point of another god, and sway things in his/her direction.

Re-playability: 10
Another perfect score for Sacrifice. Just as I said in the story/plot part, you can replay the game again and again to get the full blast. No matter how much you play, you will most likely end up finding a mission you have never played, which leads up to more un-played missions and so on. It never ends ^_^

Over-all: 9
Well, what can I say? Great story, graphics and gameplay. What are you waiting for? Go buy this!

Buy, rent, or look at the cover in a shop? Buy. Now.

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 11/16/03