A major gripe with the first soul sacrifice was that of the difficulty curve. Delta mixes this up by rebalancing a lot of the offerings, as well as the damage and HP of earlier monsters. Going back to early quests makes you feel sufficiently powerful, while the late game pacts are incredibly challenging in some instances. Your most powerful offerings can also be upgraded into Black offerings, giving increased potency at the cost of fewer casts. This may not always be worth the trade-off, but some spells become more powerful than they ever were before.
The biggest addition is the ability to pick your side. In the original title, players were restricted to serving Avalon, the Sorcerer’s guild focused on destroying archfiends, those who’d been transformed by their submission to one of the 7 deadly sins. Avalon is still present, but players can also opt to join Sanctuarium, a guild focused on the salvation of these beasts, and Grim, an organization that feels things are best left to Fate. Each guild has different benefits to saving, sacrificing, or remaining neutral, but they typically boil down to renewal of your offerings (incredibly useful, I might add), restoring your health, or giving you a movement speed increase. It may seem a bit underwhelming, but this variety in the gameplay styles does help, as going Divine, Neutral or Chaos each appears to have tangible benefits that other trees do not. There is some overlap, but the trees feel unique, and encourage different play-styles.
With the addition of Grim also comes the addition of new archfiends, subtly based on fairy tales of the same name. These new archfiends are all macabre re-imaginings of these classic childhood fables, often not skimping on the tragic aspect. Hansel and Gretel is no longer about those precocious sweet-toothed youngsters foiling a witch, but instead two children who were left to starve and ultimately becoming two candy coated locust-like behemoths that live in gingerbread houses, consuming passerby that get lured into their candy town. Let that sink in for a moment. Comcept’s incredibly creative take on these fairy tales is still one of my favourite parts of this series, and Delta only gives us more of these disturbing and outright tragic tales.
Offerings on the whole have been rebalanced, with new ones also being created. You can also combine certain offerings, either giving them added effects, or improving them outright. Homing Offerings can be used to power up the golems you can summon, or you can use a roar offering to shatter them, turning them into a tiny squad of mobile miniature beasts that run around and pulverize whatever they can get their tiny hands on. You can also combine the evasion spells with the melee offerings, making the close combat incredibly viable. Each offering has its own use, and only some offerings can make use of these evasive maneuvers in unique ways. Beast users could dash through an enemy over and over, while Arm users could use the Mole Offering, burrowing underground to deliver a Shoryuken of sorts. Arms also have the added ability to interrupt archfiend attacks, giving incentive to make use of the slow charge attack. I could go on and on about what other changes were incorporated, but to say the combat is the same would be an understatement. It has received a massive overhaul and it feels much more satisfying to use all the offerings this time around. The ways that these combos can be performed aren’t clear unfortunately, but they helped ease this shortcoming by adding the ability to test your load-out in a tiny area, letting you mix and match to find combos to your hearts content. A bit of direction would have been nice, though.
While the game is indeed worthy of the high praise I’ve given it, it still suffers from some of the shortcomings not only from its past iteration, but also of all “hunting” games. If you are the sort to get bored of hunting monsters over and over, Delta won’t have much staying power for you. I’ve also heard of reports of slowdown but haven’t experienced any myself, outside of when I’d play online in Alice’s maze, but that’s mostly due to the high amount of detail that was put into the area. The graphics are noticeably improved, with higher quality textures and models being present, and the battles are just as colorful and chaotic as they always were. The new enemies and areas are a particular point of improvement though. If the first title didn’t’ hold your interest, then there may be no point in checking out Delta, but for those who played the first or avoided it, Delta is easily the definitive point of entry. It’s a legitimate expansion, and the sheer amount of new content and improvements to the vanilla content make it feel like a new game entirely. If you have a vita and have been looking for a title that has some meat to it, then Soul Sacrifice Delta may be just what the sorcerer ordered.
- Scott Sullivan
The Good:
- Immense amount of content and customization, highly replayable
- Gameplay has been tweaked and rebalanced. Partners are competent, instead of deadweight. Offering combos add a new level of depth
- New lore and monsters are just as tragically morbid as ever
The Bad:
- Same style of gameplay, can be a bit of a grind at times
- Graphical slowdowns are rare but they still occur
- New Grim faction stories are a bit short compared to Avalon and Sanctuarium
