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Anteater · 04-17-2014, 08:43 PM

While not directly related to my childhood musings, I thought I'd hand the spotlight over to a long forgotten PC gaming masterpiece I used to obsess over in a more primordial era...an obscure yet amazing outing from Shiny Entertainment known as Sacrifice. It's a completely unique title even fourteen years after its release, and in all honesty I keep hoping one of these days some studio will revisit this game's universe and expand upon it, but I think I'd have a better chance at winning the lottery at this point.

Everything about this game is unusual: the development team behind it was only a couple of guys and it featured some absolutely stellar voice work from giants like Tim Curry and Tony Jay...but perhaps most importantly, although the game is Real Time Strategy, the whole thing is played from a tight 3rd person perspective at ground level. For a better idea at how this works gameplay wise, here's a blurry teaser:

Despite being as old as it is, there's a deftly told and excellently paced story to aid the immersion experience that holds up well today. You play as Eldred, a dimension hopping wizard who ends up in a strange world ruled by five gods of various element and alignment. Each god implores you to do work for them rather than the others, and which god you decide to serve (or if you decide to jump between different gods) determines the course of the main single player campaign. This gives the game a lot of re-playability since there's at least eight different endings depending on your choices.

Each "mission" a god sends you on is different (and the objectives for each level will vary as well), but you are always initially transported down into a battlefield. You are given an Altar which is like your base, and you can cast spells and summon various creatures to build an army. Your enemies are often wizards like yourself who also summon creatures, cast spells and serve other gods. Your two main "resources" (because what RTS game would be complete without 'em, lol!) are mana and souls respectively. You can't summon creatures without souls, and you can't cast spells without mana.

It should be noted that the game does a helluva job at making it a real challenge to win and complete your various missions while still defending your Altar from desecration by enemy wizards. Resources, as you might guess, are going to be scarce at times, especially the further into the game you go. But hey, that's just part of why Sacrifice is such a blast.

I'm not going to spoil anything else here, but for anyone looking for a real gem from the past to throw yourself into on today's hardware, pick up this Hieronymus Bosch-inspired nightmare of a PC delight and enjoy an experience unlike anything else before or since. Toodles!