NOTE: This review covers the single-player campaign of Sacrifice.

Those familiar with Brutal Legend will see this interesting idea at work, but Sacrifice trips up a potentially fun idea with a dragging pace and a terribly designed campaign.

Players control a wizard in a struggle between five different gods. From the story mode, a former emperor turned loyal wizard to the gods must choose a side and eventually come to battle with a demon he had summoned long ago. The story is surprisingly serious for a Shiny Entertainment game - while having some splashes of silliness contained within, the story settles into some uninteresting and forgettable fantasy elements.

Gameplay is a mix between third-person action and RTS, where the player wizard has to summon troops around them and can only assign orders based on that line of sight (with an option to use some of the minimap for targeting). This has some promising potential, as casting spells during battle sound like they may turn the tide, but the execution of this varies and rarely pays off later in the campaign. The player naturally regenerates mana but has to summon creatures and take over structures called Manaliths to inch closer to the enemy wizard's altar and gather more mana regen along the way. When an enemy creature is killed, their soul must be converted in a slow process before the player has access to that resource, as souls are used to create new creatures.

The type of creature and how useful they are vary, ranging from foot soldiers to flying troops to ranged enemies. This suggests an interesting triangle, but by the end I was summoning as much of the final overpowered troop as I possibly could. The campaign missions also often setup overwhelming disadvantages that swarm the player very early in the game, making many missions feel impossible to make any meaningful progress in without cheats.

This is a shame because even without any intricate RTS design being taught (which likely would come more into play in multiplayer) the game is set to make sure the human player moves at an agonizingly slow pace and their enemies consist of 1-3 wizards who already have manaliths and enemies all setup. It's very frustrating because the player ends up being punished for trying to play the game normally, and this rarely improves as the campaign progresses (enemy wizards peace out halfway through missions, AI is very aggressive and cruel).

Sacrifice has the potential to be a better game, but its RTS elements feel like the player should just form a blob of enemies and move forward as some type of action game hybrid while still going as slow as an RTS. Combined with a poorly designed campaign and we'd have to wait until something like Brutal Legend for this type of design to be worth playing.