Sacrifice

When it comes to below-the-radar cult classics that have fallen by the wayside with the evolution of the industry, it’s hard to be more overlooked than Sacrifice.

2001 saw the release of Shiny Entertainment’s stab at a 3D third-person RTS, a transformation of the genre that put the camera directly behind, rather than twenty yards above, the player character. It wasn’t the first of its kind by any means, but in terms of graphical quality, gameplay and plot-heaviness, I’m prepared to consider it as such. Forget the constricting isometric views and click-mouse-until-dead strategies of top-down RTS games like Diablo and Dungeon Siege; in Sacrifice, the map draws as far as the eye can see, and concentrated rapid-fire clicking will probably get you gibbed. 

A story overview on Good Old Games, where Sacrifice is being offered for 5.99, indicates that “the Creator, god of the Fyllid, has been defeated and the faith of the people has begun to wane” – not that I heard that particular tidbit anywhere within the game’s lengthy dialogue. What players are likely to piece together is that you play as Eldred, a wizard and the former tyrant ruler of a ruined kingdom called Jhera, who has fled to a new realm after a misguided attempt at conjuration that summoned a destructive demon called Marduk. There, he finds five gods (those of Life, Earth, Weather, Fire, and Carnage) embroiled in a war for dominance that, until Eldred’s arrival, has amounted to little more than verbally sniping at each other across a trans-dimensional no man’s land.

Each of the gods has a very different idea about how power politics should play out, leaving it to Eldred to decide which of them he can use to pursue his own agenda. Nuanced scriptwriting takes the story from here; nearly all of the dialogue, both story-related and otherwise, is written and performed with skill – and how could it not be? It’s got Tim Curry, for God’s sake.

Sacrifice’s branching-paths story progression mode may feel more like an R.L. Stein Choose-Your-Adventure book than a dynamic plotline, but you’re still technically free to pick and choose which egomaniacal deity to serve in each of the game’s 10 or so mission ranks. This allows you to build a custom ability book, with your chosen god giving you a specific summon and spell at each separate rank – at least, until the plot-induced point of no return narrows your options and funnels you into a single campaign path. That said, any freedom is good freedom, and Sacrifice at least makes you feel like you earned the ending you get. I’m not even prone to playing evil (I wibble when Pikmin die), and I still stand by my decision to help Charnel, God of Destruction, kill absolutely everything.

Sacrifice does something that I always like to see fantasy games try, which is to come up with its own definition of magic. There’s no set mythos at work in Sacrifice; you play as a wizard who can cast spells and has a wisecracking airborne familiar, but otherwise, Shiny Entertainment’s imagination is the only limit. Always presented with a tongue-in-cheek flair that alternates between tasteful drama, dry wit and slapstick comedy, Sacrifice’s mythology is purely its own creation. Creating setpieces like manaliths, shrines and manahoars forms your secondary goal as you wander the landscape fighting for a monopoly on the map’s reserves of mana, and the combination of mechanics isn’t quite like any other game out there.

Thanks to Sacrifice’s hands-on unit control and battle system, I spent many a happy hour jogging across wide, eerily barren plains, shifting my minions into triangles and phalanxes for fun, blasting my enemies with chain lightning until they exploded into fluffy giblets of blood. A flock of tatter-winged Hellmouths formed a V-shaped battering ram before me, and I was trailed by weird dodos and umbrella-monsters that might be caught populating the dreams of Lewis Carroll (in fact, a number of viewers have likened the designs to creations of Hieronymous Bosch). In this case I’m tempted to say that crude, polygonal monster models are forgivable when the creatures they animate have this much character: though they vary in usefulness, each monster you create has a distinct, and often hilarious, personality.

An on-screen HUD, displaying health, mana, available spells/summons and souls collected, is present but downscaled. Sacrifice gives you the tools to play it like a standard RPG but never loses sight of the fact that the player is perfectly able to forego buttons and widgets and use mouse-movement-based commands to control the battlefield with the power of gesture (yes, just like a real wizard). This, like many other features of Sacrifice, is something that was largely ignored by the gaming community in lieu of other high-profile gesture-based games like Black & White, which makes it all the more important to credit Sacrifice for the innovation where credit is due.

The sense of the attack, arranging your forces into battle formations and charging ahead with magical projectiles at your fingertips, is ultimately satisfying, but it’s never easy to get over your annoyance at the game’s technical complexity. 

The mechanics of Sacrifice are not difficult to get used to: collect souls, summon creatures, arrange creatures into groups, and leave base camp on a jolly journey to desecrate opposing council’s altar. However, critics don’t complain about micromanagement for nothing; Sacrifice’s insanely finicky organizational requirement makes categorizing huge numbers of troops and coordinating an attack while managing to not leave anyone behind an intelligence test in itself, to say nothing of the sensory overload you’ll experience in your first skirmish when your screen is full of special effects and your familiar won’t stop whining plaintively in your ear that your creatures are dying.

The pace of battle ranges from sluggish (jogging across the landscape with nary an enemy in sight) to speedy (you can’t click this fast when there is pixilated blood flying everywhere) to lightning-fast (wow, how did I get so dead in four seconds?). At times, it seems that your only chance for success is to know exactly what you’re doing and where you’re going at all times – or what your enemy is thinking – because one bad troop placement can get you repeatedly wiped out by the sometimes infuriatingly competent AI.

On the artistic side, Sacrifice seems to have itself taken care of for the next few generations of gaming. Years after its release, the polygonal, slow-to-render character models and jagged landscapes look endearing, not dated, and expert use of color means that your attention lingers on the most important parts of the visuals. One must realize, however, that they are old and technically imperfect – one thing I’ll never get used to is the obscene, continuous lolling of Eldred’s elastic jaw, which makes it seem as though all of his dialogue should be “aahahwaaghhaaahwawhagha” rather than the smart, drawn-out monologues his voice actor is actually delivering. 

About 70 percent of Kevin Manthei’s soundtrack seems to feature the most amazing French Hornist in the history of video game music, and the other 30 percent keeps busy being moody and atmospheric in all the right places – the theme of Persephone, the Great Healer, creates a rich, sweeping carpet of strings and percussion, and Stratos’s Theme is as oppressive and lonely as wandering across his icy kingdom makes you feel. All of this is accomplished with the use of real, non-synthesized instruments, a rarity in the games of the early 2000s, but Manthei is not married to his sweeping orchestral numbers, either: a good bit of the soundtrack is comprised of solemn ambient noisescapes that represent the best of what electronic music can be.

Campaign mode is campaign mode. It’s short, sweet, and can be replayed multiple times for different endings and spell setups, but multiplayer is what keeps you from relegating it to the shelf immediately post-playthrough. Online skirmishes let you play with the custom spellbook from your last playthrough, and as any of the colorful characters you’ve encountered throughout story mode (my personal favorite is Seerix, a demihuman cobra with a headdress, spindly fingers and a chain-smoker’s voice). If your internet connection is lacking, or you don’t have any friends, offline skirmish mode also gives you a no-strings-attached one-rounder to settle any scores you have with AI-controlled characters.

I should mention that Sacrifice was my first introduction to level editing, albeit with simple visual editor tools in an extremely user-friendly terraforming and scripting tool named Scapex that Shiny thoughtfully bundled with the game. Part of the benefit of Sacrifice’s uniform terrain and dull, unpopulated landscapes is their malleability: with Scapex, curious players can conform an enormous square landscape to topographical perfection, add trigger points and enemy behaviors, and write their own dialogue to create what could almost pass as a dev-made construction. Experimentation with this convenient addition works well with the multiplayer and offline skirmish modes to extend Sacrifice’s shelf life well past the 6-ish hours it will probably take for you to complete the short, short story mode. 

Since making Sacrifice, Shiny Entertainment has gone defunct after having earned itself a reputation for mediocrity with a few ill-advised Matrix games. Through a series of assimilations that would make Caesar’s Legion blush, it was absorbed into Infogrames (later renamed Atari), Foundation 9, and finally Double Helix Studios, the dev most recently responsible for the new Silent Hill game. We can also assume that most of the minds at Shiny have moved on and been lost to us, and thus that Sacrifice is likely forever doomed to be known as “that old, unknown-yet-innovative game that reviewers across the industry randomly pull out and rave helplessly about.” Seriously, shouldn’t we be naming this game a work of National Heritage or something? Anyone?

Editor comment