Soul Sacrifice PS Vita Review

Soul Sacrifice is a brand new PlayStation Vita video game from Megaman’s creator Keiji Inafune released on April 30th, 2013. This gripping monster hunting game follows a beautifully bizarre story line about a insane sorcerer who’s destroying the world.

The character you begin with in the game is a prisoner who’s waiting to be executed. You come across a talking diary of an anonymous sorcerer who is connected with the main villainous sorcerer. Each memory contains a mission where you’re able to learn the anonymous sorcerer’s abilities and break out of your jail cell. Overall, the game is definitely worth the buy.

What to Love

Strategy is based on the choices the player makes during the game. Each time you kill something, you’re given the choice on whether or not you want to save or sacrifice it. You can boost you magical powers through sacrifice and your life and defense through saving. Different story paths and rewards open up depending on the choices made.

Hard hitting and fast-paced combat is the game’s main focus. Players can choose up to six magical powers that provide an interesting depth to fighting. The magical powers you choose and how you boost them between combat scenes will determine your success in game play.

The game contains no stamina bar, which allows you to fight to your heart’s content. However, you’ll lose your magical powers if you use them up in their entirety for the course of the match.

It is important for a player to have a mix of close, mid, and long range powers to choose from during battle. Some enemies may be easily defeated by ice magic and others may be more susceptible to fire magic. Some of the monsters in the game fly. Since you don’t know beforehand what will work, it’s a good idea to have a balance of the three forms of weaponry in your armament.

The game also has super-powers called Black Rites. These can help you bring level bosses down but not without a price. The game is based on the idea of sacrifice, so if you use these you’ll have to sacrifice a part of your body until you buy back the Black Rite again.

For example, if you use a Black Rite against the first boss, you will see your fire defenses cut in half during the game until you buy the superpower again. If you want to try it out, a playable demo was released on April 16th which you can download.

As for additional content, The Iron Lady’s Tears DLC expanded the story and added new quests, monsters, and spells to the game. This was also accompanied with the The Cobbler Triplets and the Old Master DLC pack that introduced a new set of quests and encounters, allowing players to face off against powerful adversaries and acquire new offerings and sigils.

Game Negatives

There’s no depth to the levels in the game. The scenery consists of battle arenas and allows for no exploration of the scenery. Combat can be boring and repetitive in that you fight the same type of monsters over and over again. The only thing that changes is the strength of the monsters you encounter.

The game rewards you by allowing you to collect a currency called lacrima in the game. The way you collect this currency is quite gross. You’ve got to wipe slime off your screen that leaks from the ugly eye of the talking diary.

Our GLN review gives Soul Sacrifice on the PS Vita a Rating: 8 out of 10 overall.