Sacrifice (video game)

Sacrifice (video game)

Sacrifice is a real-time strategy video game published by Interplay Entertainment in 2000 for Microsoft Windows platform. Players control wizards who fight each other with spells and summoned creatures. Players customize their attacks by choosing from spells and creatures aligned to five gods. To defeat an opponent, the player’s wizard sacrifices a friendly unit at the opposing wizard’s altar.

About Sacrifice (video game) in brief

Summary Sacrifice (video game)Sacrifice is a real-time strategy video game published by Interplay Entertainment in 2000 for Microsoft Windows platform. Players control wizards who fight each other with spells and summoned creatures. Players customize their attacks by choosing from spells and creatures aligned to five gods. To defeat an opponent, the player’s wizard sacrifices a friendly unit at the opposing wizard’s altar, thereby desecrating it and banishing the enemy wizard. The graphic engine of the game uses tesselation: thousands of polygons are used to display an object and as lesser details are needed, the number of polyons is reduced. Despite winning several awards, Sacrifice was not a commercial success. The game was ported to Mac OS 9. 2 in 2001. It is not focused on large-scale management of resources and bases. Instead, the game emphasizes micromanagement of the success of the players’ units’ success in the game, linked to the gods they are aligned to. It was praised by reviewers for the novel designs of its creatures and for its humorous content. The high level of attention needed to manage its frenetic combat was mentioned as a flaw, The game’s multiplayer mode offers a single-player campaign and up to four players can play against each other over computer networks. In a rock-paper-scissors manner, each class is a counter to another. In the single player campaign, each character can choose from three classes: melee, ranged, and air. The gods are designed along the ethos of the five gods: Perseows, God, Charnel of Strife, Stratos, Pyro, and God of Earth, and the natural elements associated with earth, air, and fire, respectively.

Players start with a few souls and increase their resources by locating unclaimed souls, or by converting the souls of unfriendly creatures their wizards have killed. Two units, manahoars and sac doctors, have special purposes: Manahoars help to recharge their summoner’s Mana by channeling energy from manaliths to him or her. Sac doctors are summoned to extract souls of fallen opponents and bring them back to the altar for conversion. These units are also summoned to hold the sacrificial rituals required for holding the sacrifices required for desecration of enemy altars; killing a sac doctor disrupts the process. Unlike many of its contemporary real- time strategy games, Sacrifice places little emphasis on resource gathering and management. There is no system of workers; the players’ wizards collect souls to summon creatures, and their Mana—energy for casting spells—constantly regenerates. More advanced combat spells affect large areas of the battlefield, taking the form of tornadoes and volcanoes. A player’s Wizard defeats an opponent by desecrated his or her altar through the magical ‘sacrifice’ of a friend’s altar. A wizard can monopolize a Mana fountain by erecting a structure known as a manalith over it. Because mana can always be regained, it is an infinite resource.