We’re back with another instalment of Backlog Blues, and this time it will be different. No, really it will. I promise it won’t be like last time. I swear I finished Of Orcs and Men, honest. Arkhail got all angry and totally killed the king. Or was it an emperor?
Okay look, certain obligations like reviews, my personal life and a bad habit of trying new games before I finish the old ones got in the way. It’s unavoidable so let’s just get stuck into what I’m playing now and pretend Of Orcs and Men was awesome all the way to the last chapter, which I totally finished by the way.
Guitar Hero Live
So GH Live had piqued my curiosity when I had seen the new controller layout. If you hadn’t seen it take a look here.
The idea is that the button layout is now based around your index, middle and ring finger to form chords. This change was big enough to make me keep an eye for it to go on sale and I can say it’s not half bad. The set list is a lot of hot garbage if you dislike artists like Fall Out Boy, Skrillex and Bring Me The Horizon, but it’s got a few personal favourites like “When You Were Young” by The Killers and “I Will Wait” by Mumford and Sons. The single player’s visuals have been replaced with live-action video sequences of fake bands playing on a stage in front of a cheering crowd. The reactions of your band mates and the crowd reflect how you’re performing on songs and it’s awfully cheesy in an oddly charming way.
Instead of the traditional DLC structure the past games followed, GH Live enters into MTV territory with music channels and scheduled programming. From this new GHTV system you can simply login and begin playing along with music videos almost immediately. The downside of this is a free-to-play style system of buying and earning “Plays” of songs in the GHTV catalogue. This allows you to play any song they’ve got in the database but Plays wear out quickly if you’re earning them through GHTV’s music channels. Don’t got the time to grind out coins? No worries, you can use the wonderful powers of micro-transactions to save the day and let you keep rocking the tunes you want! Coin boosters and premium passes bog down an otherwise neat idea; it’s just a shame that GHTV is ridden with a stingy free-to-play system.
But honestly, GH Live isn’t totally awful. The new controller and GHTV mode breathes some live into the corpse of the franchise and after being so disappointed with how boiler-plate Rock Band 4 was, this was if anything a pleasant surprise.
Sacrifice
Sacrifice was a real-time strategy RPG from my childhood. You know those free games you might have gotten when your parents bought a new PC? Sacrifice was one of those games for me. You play as Eldred, a man from a distant land whom appears before a group of quarrelsome gods that strive for dominion over each other. You begin to upset the balance of power by assisting any god of your choice and each has their own distinctive personalities, wants and rivalries. Let’s take a look at a few of them:
- Persephone: Goddess of life. She maintains that her rule is just and fair, though her zealotry to her ideals is an issue for even her allies. She demonizes any gods that stand in her way as evil in the face of justice but in reality Persephone is a vain and childish goddess that throws tantrums when her way isn’t met with overwhelming agreement.
- James: God of Earth. He seeks peace for the people under his rule, the Yeoman. He allies with Persephone, but as mentioned before, her ironclad attitude for war tends to drag James into fights he and his people want nothing to do with. He’s seen as a voice of reason among the group though will not hesitate to defend himself if other gods and their wizards encroach on his domain.
- Stratos: God of Air. He deems himself superior to his colleagues and believes he alone should rule the realm. His tendency to lie and use others to further his cause makes him an untrustworthy ally in the eyes of the gods.
These are just three of the six gods Eldred can side with in the main campaign. The gameplay is a mix of RPG and RTS mechanics in which you cast spells and summon minions to defeat an enemy wizard. Wizards rely on resources such as mana fountains and the souls of their minions to keep fighting. They can convert enemy souls to produce extra units and push their opponent back to the enemy altar. Once any defence has been dealt with, the attacking wizard must banish their foe by desecrating the altar. Sacrifice was a fantastic game for its time. Not many games in 2000 had melded RPG, action and strategy until much later when titles like Brutal Legend drew inspiration from it for its stage battle mode. It holds up amazingly well and is available on GOG.com.
With summer being chock-full of games, I’ve been finding it hard to go back and pick up anything I might not be able to finish before something else requires my attention. Quantum Break is two weeks away, so in the meantime I think I’ll keep playing Sacrifice and perhaps start something new. What have you been playing?
Let us know in the comments!
