Retro Review: Sacrifice

In an RTS game, you play the role of a god who looks down from above – you’re a disembodied force that floats across the fields of battle, looks at the vast expanses, and plans attacks on a large scale. Each unit is a piece in your chess game, a pawn in your master plan.

Shiny Entertainment’s Sacrifice makes you one of the chess pieces. That piece is an emperor named Eldred who summoned Marduk, a demon, to deal with his political opponents. But Marduk becomes uncontrollable and destroys Eldred’s world. Eldred flees to another world that is split between five squabbling gods. A prophecy of a traitor in their midst, plus the arrival of Eldred, creates a power struggle. As all the bickering, battling, and political maneuvering occurs, a new evil emerges into the fray. An evil the gods send you to deal with.

Choose wisely, as only one god can bless you with Bovine Intervention.

In between missions, you witness the debates and arguments that rage between the gods in their temples. While the narrative is a dark and somber high fantasy, the game never takes itself too seriously. The dynamic personalities of the gods make for some depth as their conversations give glimpses into motivations and philosophies as well as creating some ambiguities over which gods are evil and which are good. The storytelling isn’t magnificent, but it’s enough to make you want to know what exactly it is you’re doing in any given task.

For the first few missions, you can hop back and forth between gods, and conceivably help two enemies fight each other, but eventually a side must be chosen. Each god has a nine-mission-long unique campaign that will shape the ending of the narrative.

This is actually one of the bigger armies in the game.

If you wanted to over-classify Sacrifice, you could say troop management is the RTS half and spell casting is the RPG half. In some ways, they are simpler versions of each genre. The tech trees that practically define RTS games are nonexistent in Sacrifice, as are the large-scale battles. Likewise, the RPG elements aren’t all that complex. There are almost no visible numbers in the game – not even hit-points. And you aren’t able to level up your skills or read up on the specific effects of each spell.

Sacrifice makes up for its lack of depth with a blend of two genres that’s so unique, the line between the two is nearly imperceptible. Take for instance one of pillar of the RTS: resource gathering. In Sacrifice’s case, to create a unit, you must collect souls from enemy creatures you’ve killed. Doing this requires casting a spell to convert them to your pool of souls, making resource gathering more akin to the kill/loot cycle that a plethorta of RPGs utilize.

Even though the battles are smaller, that doesn’t stop the maps from being epic.

Another RTS/RPG hybrid trait found in Sacrifice: troop management. While you can form groups, create formations, and manage movement much like any other real time strategy game, the fact that your troops walk along with you makes them feel more like RPG companions than an RTS army. And then there’s base building; before making structures to capture souls or restore your mana, you’re required to find predetermined spots and cast a spell to conjure up the framework. In this way, just about every action you take in the RTS has a taste of RPG; at times, distinguishing between the two is near impossible.

Speaking of the near impossible, as the game progresses, you take on seemingly insurmountable odds. Sacrifice has no qualms about absolutely slaughtering you. One mission I played gave me one unit, two souls, and a sizable enemy force located half a minute away. It took me an hour just to perfect a scenario where I could survive the first two minutes. It’s in these missions that you’re vying for every inch of ground that makes the game shine. You’ll have to use on-the-fly troop management and know when and where to use your spells in order to simply survive, let alone win.

Collecting souls is a grossly awesome task.

The idea of blending RTS and RPG has been in the minds of a lot of modern game developers. With the rebirth of Defense of the Ancients clones and the increase in micromanaged, focused RTS games, this trend is on the rise. The problem is that these games seem to create two distinct mechanics inherently separate from each genre. These developers could learn a lot from Sacrifice. Its creative, albeit simplified, mash-up of the two gaming categories creates an exceptional and fun experience that any fan of either genre should be able to enjoy.

Buy Sacrifice from Good Old Games for $5.99.