Soul Sacrifice Review

Here at GameGrin there aren't many of us who own a PlayStation Vita, so as my fellow PSV owners were in a busy schedule, it fell to me to review Soul Sacrifice. At first it I thought it looked like a simple fantasy hack n' slash. I found I was wrong.

From the beginning, not much is revealed about what's going on, other than a mad sorcerer named Magusar has destroyed almost all the world and is consuming all life as 'sacrifices' in order to attain eternal life. The player is one of his victims, locked in a cell, awaiting sacrifice.

When looking around the cell, you find a strange talking book called 'Librom', who is basically a book of a particular sorcerers memories. The specific sorcerer was with Magusar before he went insane and by reading through Libroms tale the player grows more powerful and learns more and more about the mysterious Magusar.

You learn the secrets of the journal by taking part in 'Phantom Quests', in which you basically relive the events of what happened. Why Librom doesn't just tell you the brief version of what happens I'll never know, I guess he thought it was more interesting for you to follow the sorcerer's dramatic tale yourself.

Here, in Soul Sacrifice, sorcerers aren't like they normally are. Forget Gandalf or Harry Potter, these guys will stab you in the back and even kill one-another in a heartbeat. To a sorcerer, everyone is expendable.

As you probably gathered, your main form of attacking is using your sorcery powers to conjure various different ways to slash, hack, freeze, burn, poison and explode enemies with. Your spells, called 'offerings', are fairly normal objects which sorcerers adapt and use to create weapons and wreak havoc. You can have up to six offerings equipped at one time, and can change offerings in between levels.

Whenever you defeat an enemy in the game you have the choice of saving them, or sacrificing them. You can only use an offering a set amount of times before you exhaust it and sacrificing an enemy restores offering power and boosts your Magic level, which increases your attack every time you level up. Saving an enemy will boost your life meter and, when full, it will level up your defence and recovery, and restore some health.

If you use up all of an offering's power, you can undo it using 'Lacrima': a special substance obtained from Librom which can rewrite certain segments of the book, such as changing your name or bringing fallen allies back from the dead. The use of Lacrima is important, as misusing it can result in not being able to erase an ally's death, or replenish a powerful offering.

The enemies encountered break away from the cliche fantasy game types, with 'Foul Creatures' such as Orcs - which here are mutated, flesh hungry cats, Goblins - which are now rats and Kobolds, which in Soul Sacrifice are mobile trees. These hostile creatures were once normal animals (and plants), but exposure to the magical atmosphere produced by sorcery caused them to mutate, but also drove them mad and made them extremely aggressive.

Other enemies include the powerful Archfiends, former sorcerers who have lost their humanity and become fearsome monsters in their own right. A sorcerer becomes an Archfiend by one of two methods. Greed, corruption and a lust for power may lead a sorcerer down this dark route, or they may be wounded and infected by a monster, which leads to the corruption of their being. Either way, these creatures are the bane of sorcerers everywhere and it has been decreed that they must be destroyed; they must be sacrificed, never saved.

However, despite this decree the choice to save or sacrifice remains with the player, although each choice will have its own repercussions and should not be taken lightly.

Level design is fairly simple in Soul Sacrifice, and pretty much follows the structure of 'go in, complete your quest, get out'. Phantom Quests can either be Exploration Pacts, Foul Creature Extermination Pacts or Archfiend Extermination Pacts. There are only about 20 areas so you will re-visit places frequently, making levels feel very samey. It can get a tad repetitive with the small range of locales in comparison to the vast amount of levels.

It does seems strange that they kept Soul Sacrifice as PSV exclusive when it easily could have worked on a home console. Little-to-no use of the Vita's specific capabilities feature at all. The touchscreen is only used when in Librom, although it is optional and easier to just use the standard controls; and in Ghost mode, which is entered so rarely anyway it makes the touchscreen almost pointless. The back touchscreen isn't used at all, and the tilt sensor is only used when looking around the jail cell when first loading the game and it's so fiddly and annoying that it may as well not be there.

It is a shame because the story is great, graphics are great and gameplay is great; so it's sad that players on PS3 won't be able to enjoy this game.

But, those points aside, I found Soul Sacrifice to be an extremely awesome game. The campaign lasts you a while, it took me a good 40, maybe 50 hours before I beat the game, and that's not even all the Avalon Pacts done, just the main quests. The story is very well thought through, and the game really makes you think before you act, but thinking too long will result in failure, and everything will have a consequence. Overall, not a title that should be mistaken for 'just another fantasy hack n' slash title'.