The part about why the author spent another 600 hours playing after the negative review is heartwarming as heck: to help other people modding.
Battlezone 98 was an incredible game for me, even if I didn't get far into it. The blend of fps and rts felt sweeping and epic, gave a sense of scale I hadn't experienced. The game ran incredibly smoothly on the Pentium mmx with crappy voodoo banshee.
My hours logged is nowhere near Sacrifice, a game with incredibly different setting (planes hopping wizard currying favor with local dieties), but both games had that blend of first-person and rts that was incredibly challenging & of incredibly neat scale, teaversing huge open spaces. I only play them once or twice a decade now, but they're games that recur in my thoughts a lot.