So the demo for this game has been out a little while, but because of time constraints we were not able to really dig into this demo. And boy, were we missing out.
Soul Sacrifice is the highly anticipated Playstation Vita game coming out at the end of the month. It revolves around a prisoner to the sorcerer Magusar, and as his neighbor prisoner gets executed, our hero discovers a demonic book that introduces the game's uniqe way of storytelling.
Instead of a traditional approach, Soul Sacrifice tells its story through passages in the demon book with well acted eerie voices and a gothic, atmospheric background music. Several times we found ourselves forgetting what we were doing and just listening and absorbing the ambiance.
In between the story segments there is an arena style of combat sequence, reliving the author of the book's life, combat is solid and fun, yet challenging and rewarding. You use 'spells' to fight, like an ice spell that flows along the ground to your target, or summon melee weapons for some hack and slash action, there are also support spells, like shields and healing spells.
All spells has an easy upgrade system, but can be lost if over-used in a combat. There are, however, places in each arena where you can refill magic. Taking down your enemies presents you with a choice; Save and fill a portion of your 'life' level bar, increasing defence and your hp, or 'Sacrifice' increasing your magic power.
This also applies to bosses, and when finishing off the first main story boss we wanted to 'Save', it simply brought it back to life, so ideally there would be a branching story for whatever you chose between save/sacrifice. But the story hadus so enthralled it left a feeling like we were torturing our opponent by postponing its eventual demise with the dialogue in the fight and quickly ended it with a sacrifice.
The level of costumization is overwhelming, yet not too complex. It took about three minutes to make a badass looking female sorcerer named 'Toazter'.
This is an incredibly atmospheric game with a lot of love put into it and without noticing, we had played a fully charged Vita until the batteries died right when jumping into multiplayer, so we'll leave that for the review coming soon.
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