Graphics

2D3D-fied

Wooooo... purrty. The first few hours with Sacrifice should involve a box of napkins and wiping motions around your chin. It all starts with a smooth, rolling terrain littered with shrubs, trees and a few odd structures. Your wizard walks, jogs, gallops, slithers or floats around, depending on who he is.

Dammit he killed me

Predictably enough...

For a single character, the wizard offers a wide variety of motions. For example, the tree-hugger wizard, Shakti, has this wavy-arms-dance thing going when she's in idle mode. Generally, the wizards' casting animations are a bit repetitive. You'll really notice it when attempting spells that take some time to cast.

The various minions you summon are all different from one another, but in many cases these are merely textural differences. Quite a few models are shared. Not counting the wizards, there may be a dozen models total. These minions have fairly simple tasks, so they don't get much animation effort. Not that you'll have time to notice in the middle of a fight!

Going up hill is slow work

Conversions look painful

Special effects are mostly impressive. Some less so than others. Spellcasting is definitely among the 'less so than others' - it seems to be ripped straight from EverQuest or Asheron's Call. Summon a bunch of colored pixels, have them twinkle around the character randomly, then poof when the spell's done. The pixels follow you around for spells that you can cast while moving, leaving a funky trail. Standing still, they'll bunch up into a cloud around your character and slowly dissipate. In a word, "1997."

Of course, some of the special effects are nothing short of amazing. Let's go back to the volcano, for example. The ground rises up into a mountain, shaking the screen if you're too close (now that I think it, it could have been the subwoofer shaking my room). Regardless, the ground rises up into a peak before spewing forth an orange/red/yellow pillar of lava, some 30 feet in diameter at the base. The sky turns a dark, dark gray and the area around the volcano begins raining orange dust particles. For this and similar effects, skip the paper towels and bring a bucket.

Railed!

BFG?

Thunderstruck

The sky is gorgeous. The only two other times I've ever been so captivated by a sky were the E1M1 map of Quake, and the first time I ran Mechwarrior 2 in 3Dfx mode. The sky in Sacrifice changes, pulsing with a life of its own. A volcano will turn it black and make hot ash rain down around you. Then it can clear up for a short while before erupting into a storm, complete with lightning.

Bring it, punk!

Summoning a sac doctor for the conversion

Strong, but not so strong

Sacrifice is really impressive. It uses a very nice LOD (level of detail) algorithm to keep the game looking as good as possible while maintaining a decent framerate. Some visual effects were notably dulled for our 4X FSAA pictures, and we could see mountains and trees in the distance gaining or losing detail, depending on how hectic a battle would get. The LOD isn't as noticeable as in Tribes, and at times we had to actively look for it to catch it in action.