Sacrifice Review

As I said, your wizard's spell collection is mostly determined by his choice of Gods. Different Gods offer different rewards... Personally, I prefer the offensive spells (like the backfiring Death Spell), but I guess the balanced combo works best in the game. Sacrifice offers a wide variety of well-balanced units. I imagine it has been an arduous task balancing out all the units and cramming them into a cohesive gaming experience. Luckily, the Shiny boys used some extra special grease for the job. There's just no way you'll get to use all the units by playing through a single campaign. Different units are gained courtesy of different Gods, so there are numerous unit/spells combos you can end up with on the higher levels. You can have Charnel's units and James' units, but have a blend of some of Pyro's or Persephone's spells thrown in the mix.

The enemy AI works like a charm, and I haven't really noticed any apparent inconsistencies. AI wizards are cunning enough - they'll throw spells at you like you're right smack in the middle of the Blair Witch woods, and they'll try to outsmart you by either desecrating your Altar or stealing all your souls. I have found the single player missions very challenging - the wizards are quite effective in handling lost souls, and the unit path finding works very nicely. Of course, there aren't as many obstacles as in a classic 2D RTS, but who's counting? The single player campaign is challenging enough, and the AI coding doesn't experience any nagging bugs, whilst retaining enough smarts to keep your ass occupied during battles. Even give you a hard time on a few occasions...

Although I've apparently failed in trying to go easy on the Sacrifice newbies (hell, most of you haven't played the game yet, so I do apologize), you shouldn't let the colorful nature of the presented info scare you off. Don't forget that I've been playing this game for a while now. I guess the most important thing about it is that after a while you become:
A) very comfortable with the controls - Shiny has included a whole lot of useful shortcuts, and could've included even more (assigning unit formations with a mouse is a breeze, although I've found other tactics to be more useful).
B) Players are sucked in by the single player mode, fantastic voice acting, and refreshing literary style.
And C) the damn thing is just loads of fun to play.

Sacrifice has in fact introduced so many new ideas that I'm beginning to fear it won't get enough recognition from the mass market. People that are used to playing Deer f***ing Hunter really aren't the type of crowd to go - hey, it'd be nice to play something different for a change! I somehow doubt they have the desire to try anything remotely unique, but I hope for the sake of gaming that Sacrifice does well sales-wise (the original Battlezone didn't fare so well in the financial department and yet it was an awesome title). If that happens it could stand as a precedent, which could bring the overall standards in the gaming industry a notch higher. And if anyone can do it than it's the Shiny gang. Earthworm Jim got its animated series, didn't it?

The only real con that I've managed to dig up so far is that the single player campaign could've been a little longer, and that certain large units like Dragons or Jabberocky can sometimes overcrowd the screen, even with the camera fully zoomed out. I mean it's a little hard trying to focus while a heard of elephant-like creatures is clouding your view with their huge butts. But I guess those are the 'banes' of a Soul/Mana-rich wizard, and if you do manage to fill your screen with Jabberockies, then you don't have to worry much about tactics. Just double-click on one of the large suckers, group them, and stomp your way to victory...

The fact that the single player wasn't as long as I've suspected (too easy, you pervs) doesn't really influence the game's replay value that much. As you'll no doubt discover in the near future, a game like Sacrifice is just screaming for some multiplayer action, and we've managed to trick "ShinyBoss", Dave Perry into sharing a few multiplayer tips with our readers:

Go on to the next page and read what advice Dave had to give ya!