What is Sacrifice?

Multigenre games are the latest rage, and this is a good thing. Sacrifice marries real-time strategy with role-playing features, and throws in some hot action and spell-casting for good measure. The game is set in a surreal world where five gods — Persephone, James, Stratos, Pyro, and the deliciously evil Charnel — compete for control. You play a wizard whose skills each of them seeks for a number of missions. You get to choose whom to serve, but appeasing one god means opposing the others.

The missions take you to a variety of stunning landscapes. Along the way, you must nourish your spell-casting powers by locating mana fountains and partaking of their magical energy. You also need to keep your deity happy by offering sacrificial souls at your altar. Unfortunately, the best way to get souls is to snatch up those of your enemies' followers, which exposes your own followers to the same risk. You can summon various creatures to help you: The three basic creature classes are melee, ranged, and flying.

Combat is fast and furious, and you're in the thick of it, collecting souls, coordinating attacks, and casting spells. Victory requires that you desecrate your opponent's altar while keeping your own intact.

Overall, the challenges and story lines keep you engaged, and the characters are entertaining and well voiced. However, the game has some notable flaws — there’s no multiplayer facility yet, and you can't customize your character. Plus, a strange bug disables Sacrifice’s File Mapping on machines with more than 512MB of RAM running Mac OS 9. Despite this, Sacrifice is definitely worth a look.

Todd, Robbert. (May 2002). Sacrifice. MacAddict. (pg. 55).

Download Sacrifice for Mac

Architecture

IBM PowerPC

Compatibility notes

Emulating this? It could probably run under: SheepShaver