Sacrifice is surely one of the most unique and innovative real-time strategy (RTS) games made to date, if not in fact, one of the most innovative games period. It features a number of interesting elements that make the typical RTS less punishing, while simultaneously bringing the player right into the action in a way that other RTS games fail to do. It has some minor flaws, I think, but it is overall one of the best RTS games available for purchase for reasons I shall explain.
The game looks fabulous, but only if you have the muscle to run it. On high-end hardware (at least a GeForce2 graphics card is mandatory as far as I'm concerned), Sacrifice comes through with some truly stupendous visuals. The bizarre look of the worlds on which one plays, the highly detailed textures, the sometimes spectacular spell-effects, and everything in between are rendered by a highly capable engine.
When I first ran the game, I turned up the resolution to 1024 x 768 x 32 bpp and pegged all the graphics settings at the maximum, only to be disappointed by choppy play, and that's with a 933 MHz. PIII CPU and 32 MB GeForce2 video card! I've since dropped back to 800 x 600 x 32 bpp, and it plays much more smoothly.
| NB: |
Since this review was written, I've upgraded to a 1.2 GHz. Athlon with a GeForce3 Ti 200 video card, and the game now plays like a dream at 1280 x 960 x 32 bpp. |
I have one and only one complaint against the game's visuals, and that's the silly dialogue balloons. The modeling and texturing is wonderful. The spell effects are sometimes unbelievable. All of the visual elements look utterly fantastic. At least, they do until one of those ugly, sprite-ish looking speech bubbles appears. I don't know what the developers were thinking, but those things are so ugly they're downright jarring to the senses. Get rid of them! Please!?
The audio in Sacrifice is good, though it's arguably not as amazing as the visuals. The music is really quite well done, switching moods very tastefully when battle erupts. The music alone adds a lot, but the sound effects are also good. I don't think I ever really detected the EAX extensions being put to much use, despite my selecting them, but perhaps I missed something. Or maybe it is simply the case that such positional audio is of more use in first-person shooter (FPS) games than in a game like Sacrifice? At any rate, I have no substantive complaints in the audio department. Everything sounds pretty darned good.
The interface is plagued by one really serious flaw: the inability to side-step. I am a veteran of FPS games, and I darned well expect to be able to step to the right or left. I'm so accustomed to it, in fact, that the turning behavior of Sacrifice is extremely disconcerting. It makes it very hard for me to accomplish basic navigation. It got so annoying that I eventually stopped using the keyboard altogether, putting my Microsoft Sidewinder Strategic Commander™ (SC) to good use instead. And by the way, the SC works very well with the game once you've got its buttons configured.
In the positive or negative column (I'm honestly not so sure which), the spell-specific hotkey bindings are a bit odd. While I was still using the keyboard, I bound keys to specific spells, only to find out that I had to do the same for other characters I created. It made things rather jarring. Of course, I'm not sure how the designers could have done this better as there is no particular set of spells that any particular character will be guaranteed to have. Perhaps hotkeys to activate spells by number or something like that? What I found myself wanting was some way to standardize my keyboard (and SC) layout in such a way that I could easily switch from character to character without the thrashing that I endured.
Other than these two items, the interface is pretty much what one comes to expect from the RTS genre. That is, available resources are clearly displayed, the requisite unit commands are close at hand and so forth. It took me a while to get accustomed to the whole "circular menu" thing for setting formations, attack modes and so on, but after a little practice, I would have to say it works quite well. It also bears mention that the out-of-game menu system and interface for selecting characters, adjusting settings and so forth are all as aesthetically pleasing as they are functional.
I have some familiarity with RTS games, having played Starcraft (SC), Homeworld, Earth: 2150 (E2150), and plenty of other titles. I have to say that I think Sacrifice brings certain things to the table that no other RTS game features. One of the prime problems in other RTS games is that they are too unforgiving.
Think about it. In a game like SC, one builds a bunch of units, then tries to put them to good use. If one was unlucky enough to build the wrong thing, relative to what the enemy decided to do, or if one gets ambushed along the way, or what not, then the game can pretty much be over right then and there for purely economic reasons. I hate that. It practically encourages turtling.
Sacrifice, on the other hand, adds a wonderfully refreshing and forgiving game mechanic insofar as the primary resource (viz., souls) is not so easily conquered. If a wizard is unlucky enough to have his forces get slaughtered in battle, the odds are pretty good that a quick run about the battlefield will allow him to retrieve all of the souls of his fallen warriors before the enemy SAC doctors can arrive. One quick teleport spell, and the wizard can be back near home summoning a new army.
This lone change in the typical gameplay encourages exploration and taking chances in a way that no other RTS with which I'm familiar does. It also takes some of the stress and worry away from combat, moving troops and so forth, so that the focus is more squarely on fun. Oh, and it also tends to make the games last longer than the typical five-minute, harvester-killing rushes one plays on Battle.net and elsewhere.
Further, Sacrifice perfects what BattleZone (BZ) tried to do; i.e., it puts the player right in the middle of the action. Where Sacrifice really puts BZ to shame on this count, however, is in terms of its AI, which is so much better that one doesn't spend the majority of the time fighting just to keep one's own units from colliding. The wizard's abilities are utterly crucial to ensuring victory in battle. All the while his troops are obeying his commands, he can be summoning more creatures, casting spells and so forth. Some of the battles in the single-player game—most notably the final mission—can become so incredibly involved that they leave one almost gasping for breath just from the relentless pacing. I love the RTS/FPS hybrid style, and Sacrifice takes it to a new level.
Finally, Sacrifice brings replay value to the single-player game in a way that few RTS do. I've spent literally hundreds of hours playing SC, but most of that was multi-player action against human opponents. I played through the entire single-player campaign in SC a few times, but after a while it just got boring. In contrast, Sacrifice has enormous replay value thanks to its mission-selection game mechanic. Rather than foist missions on a player, the player can choose to serve any god initially and has a fair amount of choice throughout much of the game. No other RTS game of which I'm aware provides this kind of really cool flexibility. E2150 is probably the runner-up along this line, but its flexibilityis limited to choosing only the order in which missions within a certain set will be played.
The story for this game is really quite intriguing. The whole gods battling gods thing has been a subject of literature since the beginning of recorded history, I imagine, but it hasn't previously been done in such an interactive fashion. Granted, the story is ultimately an entirely linear sort of thing, but because of the multiple, possible pathways through the game, this doesn't seem all that onerous to the player for some reason. My one complaint is that I would have preferred a bit more development along the way. The final revelations just don't have the power they might otherwise have had with a little more effort expended to suck the player into the background of the game.
The content of Sacrifice is as wonderful as it is off the beaten path. A spell like "Bovine Intervention" is worth the price of the game all by itself. The first time I cast that spell, I was literally dumbstruck as the cow went flying ridiculously high into the air, executing a very artistic dive onto the enemy unit upon which I had cast it. As mentioned previously, such effects are visually well done, but above and beyond that is the sheer creativity that went into this game.
The gods have distinct and utterly hilarious personalities. I ended up spending a lot of time taking missions from Jim, the earth god, simply because he (and his spells) utterly cracked me up. Persephone was appropriately annoying, given her combination of environmentalist-wackoism and Victorian pomposity, Charnel was just plain evil (and fun as such) and so forth. The only god for whom I did very little work was Stratos, and that was mostly because I found him more irritating, and his units less interesting, than those of the other gods.
Though the player completes only nine missions in the single-player campaign, the amount of content is actually much greater. The last mission is the same for all the gods, but otherwise each of the five gods has eight distinctive missions of his own, for a grand total of 41 missions. The variety of spells, creatures, missions and so forth is really quite large. As I said above, Sacrifice really adds a great deal of replay value to the single-player portion of the game, and that is greatly appreciated by this gamer at least.
Finally, it's worth mentioning that the environments, spells, gods, characters and so forth are all just plain fun! I've said quite a few positive things about them already, but it's worth making this crucial observation. The content of Sacrifice reflects a certain twisted sense of humor and a certain artistic style that really sucks the player into the game. I kept playing because I just couldn't help but want to see more of the world, summon more of the creatures, try more of the spells and so forth.
My one big complaint against the game is that its content is a bit fragile. There seem to have been lots of bugs in the initial release of Sacrifice, and it took me a while just to get it stable on my machine in the first place. The additional packs issued by the developer have helped somewhat, but there are still some really annoying mission bugs that have yet to be fixed. Oddly enough, the developers went silent after a while, and I've heard nothing about these problems being fixed since. It makes me wonder if the game didn't do so well financially, because it doesn't seem like it's very well supported at this point.
The multi-player aspect of the game seems relatively unremarkable, though this is probably because the single-player aspect is so unique. When I played it over the Internet, the network code seemed pretty good. My big complaint was that it was difficult to find opponents. Sacrifice is such a good game, it's a pity that it isn't more popular than it is.
I've practically begged the folks over at GameSpy to add support for it in GameSpy Arcade, but my pleas have fallen on deaf ears to date. When I have been able to find decent opponents, however, it's been a real challenge trying to pit my spell books against theirs in the heat of confrontation. The maps mostly lend themselves to typical RTS strategies, but the unique elements of the game still make it more exciting than your average RTS.
Sacrifice is a winner, pure and simple. If you like RTS games, then give this one a chance. The only kind of RTS player I can imagine who wouldn't like the game would be one who is put off by a cartoonish or fantastic looking artistic style; i.e., a player who wants his RTS games to look real. People who bought E2150 simply for its highly realistic lighting, smoke, explosions and so forth might not like the twisted artistic styling set forth in the visual elements of Sacrifice. For any other RTS gamer, though, I think Sacrifice is a very safe bet.
01/06/2001