Machina’s Machinations: Sacrifice Retrospective

In case you thought my lack of a column the last week had something to do with laziness, think again because It actually had something to do with procrastination! Well anyway, that random QOTW two weeks back about which old game deserves a sequel actually got me thinking about the good old days when gaming was only 80% about the money as opposed to 95%. It was a time when developers weren’t afraid to make games other than shooters for fear of trying something new.

And as I was thinking about which game from that era deserved a sequel, I remembered one game in particular that stood above all as a font of untapped potential; a game called Sacrifice, a Shiny Entertainment cross genre PC game back from the year 2000. Despite being acclaimed by critics as being original, well designed and having a great story, Sacrifice was declared as a commercial failure due to bad marketing and a lack of mainstream appeal, which is a pity because as I’ll try to convince you in the next 2000 words or so, it really was an amazing step forward in game development. Feeling nostalgic, I decided to downloa-… I mean, purchase the game for full retail price and play it again to see if it could stand the test of time. And amazingly, it could… despite being a decade old, there still hasn’t been a game that has even come close to replicating the unique experience that the game presented. In fact, I ended up liking Sacrifice so much that I finished the game five full times in the space of a week (hence the lack of last weeks’ column). Yes Sacrifice is just that amazing and this week I’ll be taking a break from my usual rant to just to tell you all about it and why I think that it deserves a sequel…

As I mentioned in my opening paragraph, Sacrifice was, and still is, a very unique and original game and, as such, it’s not that easy to describe to someone who hasn’t at least seen it in action; the screenshots don’t even do it any justice. The game was an interesting hybrid of several genres but the simplest way to classify it would be to call it a 3rd Person Real Time Strategy Game with Action and RPG elements. Yes the game was quite a mixed bag as far as gameplay was concerned and due to its unique nature, many found it confusing and difficult until they finally learned what the hell was going on.

In the game, the player controls a Wizard from the third person camera and, as you would expect from a game like this, you have health and mana bars and you can run around the world casting spells and summoning creatures. Now since your Wizard is fragile and only has a limited amount of mana, you’ll need creatures to do most of your bidding for you and that’s where the RTS part of the game comes in. You can issue commands to your units to attack enemies, guard units or structures, take up formations and use special abilities much like any RTS but the kicker is that you’ll be doing all of this using the 3rd Person camera. While this may seem quite difficult and unintuitive compared to most RTS games, which give you a full moving birds eye view, you’d be surprised at how well this system actually works.

Obviously things can get a little complicated when you’re in a large scale battle and you have to micromanage your own units attack orders, health and mana in addition to your own, but this is eased by the relatively intelligent creature AI and the added game play conventions. The game gives you a lot of simple options like grouping, formations and continuous orders that really make the game a lot easier to control than it could have been. But that’s not to say that it doesn’t get chaotic at times, because battles almost always do! As your Wizard levels up during the course of the story (in campaign) or over the course of a battle (in multiplayer), more and more spells become available to him and the huge variety of spells in this game really do make it a lot more fun than simply summoning a bunch of units and then just right clicking on stuff. The game can really be amazing when two giant armies collide while their commanding wizards are summoning Volcanoes, Tornadoes, Exploding Cows or even the Grim Reaper himself to aid in the battle.

But despite all the gameplay conventions, the game is still an entirely new concept and it certainly isn’t easy to get right into, especially for players not already familiar with Strategy or Action games. There’s a definite learning curve to the game when you consider that in addition to controlling your own character and camera and watching out for your health and mana, you also need to watch out for your creatures as well. Add onto this that the game also has extremely simplified RTS elements such as managing resources and building structures and it’s going to take you a bit longer than the extremely helpful tutorial to come to grips with the whole system. That being said, once you learn how intuitive it all really is, the game becomes a blast.

The Campaign in Sacrifice is probably the best you’ve ever seen in a Strategy game period. There’s an interesting mix of role playing and strategy here that, when combined with the compelling story, well acted characters and RPG style choices, make it worth playing several times over. The player takes the role of Eldred, a wandering Wizard from another realm who stumbles across a plane controlled by five warring Gods. The gods use Wizards as their agents and since Eldred is looking for a place to escape from his dark past, this realm seems like a perfect place for him to start over. And all seems well, until a prophet arrives and tells the Gods that one of them is going to betray their old laws and bring destruction to their world. And so the war between the Gods heightens and there’s alliances and backstabbing and betrayal and quite a few interesting twists along the way.

Now the game functions like a strategy game in this regard in that there are 10 missions or ‘maps’ to play through to get to the end, but the beauty comes from all the freedom that the player is given. Each of the Five Gods is unique in that they have their own personalities, motives and agendas and each of them reacts differently to the events that take place throughout the course of the game. This is where the RPG elements come in because it’s up to the player to choose which of the Five Gods to serve. Each of them will offer you a mission at the staging area between maps and it’s up to you to decide which missions to accept and which ones to decline. However it’s not as simple as that because serving one God might get you favour with him/her and their allies but you might also be sent on missions that end up offending other Gods. And while in the start you can pretty much serve whoever you wish, as the game progresses you eventually make enemies of certain Gods depending on your choices and I really don’t want to spoil what you get to do later once you grow in power and favour. Also, aside from the actual missions themselves, you’ll sometimes be offered choices that let you change allegiances or influence some of the major storyline events later in the game. A small example would be in one of the earlier missions for the God of Fire, Pyro, where if you brutally murder all of the innocent villagers for no reason, the God of Strife, Charnel, will notice and congratulate you and then ask you to come work for him.

But aside from all of their distinct characters and motives, the Gods are further differentiated by their play styles. Whenever you accept a mission from one of the Gods, you’ll receive new spells or creatures and while often the Gods tend to have similar units, each of them is always differentiated by special abilities or attributes. For example, the God of Air, Stratos, tends to get fragile units with fast movements speeds and strong abilities, while Pyro tends to get units and spells that just deal damage and blow stuff up. But again, the beauty of this system is the freedom. Since you’re not just restricted to serving one God, you can pretty much build your spell book however you wish. For example if you want to serve the God of Earth, James, to get creatures with high defense and then serve the Goddess of Justice, Persephone, to get healing spells to make your army even harder to kill, you can do just that. While eventually the choices you make do tend to have make some Gods refuse to let you serve them, you still do have a high degree of freedom in customizing your spellbook as you level up. And if you finish the campaign, you unlock the ability to create any Spellbook you wish for multiplayer so that you’re not constricted to following only one God’s skill tree.

While the Campaign is only ten missions long, each of the missions is quite lengthy and the later ones can span multiple objectives. And also, since there are five Gods with their own missions, there’s actually closer to fifty missions in the whole campaign, giving the game a lot of replay value, especially given all the choices you can make.

Even though back in the year 2000, multiplayer wasn’t really a big deal, Sacrifice does have a pretty impressive and extremely fun multiplayer in the form of LAN or online. In multiplayer, the game once again functions more or less like at RTS although with a greater degree of customization. Rather than being restricted to playing as Eldred, you’re free to choose from any Wizard in the game and there’s more to unlock depending on which ending you get in the campaign. You’re also free to choose which God’s spells to use, although if you’ve completed the single player campaign, you’re free to build your spellbook as you wish.

Once you have that sorted out, Multiplayer is a pretty straight forward affair. It’s a battle involving up to four Wizards on their own or on teams on any of the many maps available and, while there are different game modes, the most common one is “banish all enemy Wizards”. Well I’ve actually neglected to mention how the Wizard battling system works in this game, but I figure here is as good a place to mention it as any. To win a battle, you need to do a lot more than just kill the enemy Wizard. When a Wizard dies, all that happens is that the Wizard goes into spectral form until he/she receives enough mana to come back to life. While you’re a ghost, you can still move around and command your units but you can’t cast spells or collect souls which puts you at quite a disadvantage. To actually get rid of a Wizard, you need to go to his/her Altar and desecrate it so that when you next kill them, they’re banished from the realm rather than simply being turned into a temporary ghost. The system is a bit more involved than my simple explanation gives it credit, but rest assured that it works very well in the context of combining the RTS and Action parts of the game.

Winning a battle against another Wizard takes a far amount of strategy and building your army to counter theirs or using the right spells at the right time are essential to coming out on top. More than just taking down the enemy’s base, you need to work to gain ground in other ways such as capturing mana fountains on the map or converting the souls of enemy creatures before they can be reused. In this way, battles can sometimes be very involved and chaotic affairs, but sometimes there’s nothing more fun creating a giant earthquake between your enemy’s feet while your army of Phoenixes burn them to death.

As I mentioned before, the game has aged incredibly well and after ten long years of some very large progress in the gaming world, Sacrifice still somehow manages to be very playable and very fun. While you’re going to need the latest patch to play it on Windows Vista or 7, the game will run perfectly smooth without so much as a chink in frame rate or a single bug despite the massive amounts of on screen action. For its time, the graphics were amazing and they’re still quite playable even by today’s standards. While the game obviously does look dated, the impressive visual effects and quirky artistic design are still enough to make a ten year old game serve as eye candy. The gameplay still feels fresh after all this time and you won’t have to worry about the controls, the camera or technical issues getting in your way. The game was honestly a masterpiece for its time and if you can look past the dated, but still impressive visuals, you’re in for a hell of a time.

If you’re interested in playing Sacrifice after all these years then rest assured that it’s not so hard to find as you might think. You could try your luck finding it in a bargain bin somewhere or stealing a friend’s copy, or you could be desperate enough to pay a fortune to import it, but the best way to get your hands on Sacrifice is to buy it as a downloadable game for dirt cheap off of Steam. If you have Steam installed on your PC, an internet connection and a credit card, you can get your hands on it without a problem. However, if you’re opposed to the idea of shopping online with a credit card and your ethics are sketchy at best, you can email me and I’ll tell you of another way to get hold of the game.

I hope that everyone who reads this article gives this game a chance, you really won’t be sorry…