You play Sacrifice in a 3rd person perspective, similar to Tomb Raider. Your companion is a familiar named Zyzyx who gives helpful information. Resource gathering consists of claiming mana fountains, and souls from fallen creatures. The object of almost every mission is to defeat opposing wizards. This is done by 'desecrating' their altar. Aside from this, there is no way to die. When you lose all your health, you become a ghost. While you take no damage and move faster, you can't summon creatures, or cast spells...Your altar is also usually open for attack. To reincarnate yourself, you have to find an open mana source, or go back to your altar.

While spells require only mana, creatures require mana and souls. Your creatures leave blue souls, which you can claim by simply walking over. Enemy creatures leave red souls which you must first convert with a spell. This summons a Sac Doctor who takes the soul and runs it back to your altar. The three types of creatures (Air, melee, and ranged) are used in a 'rock paper scissors' type way. Generally, air counters melee, but loses to ranged, which in turn is countered by melee. While there are very powerful spells, creatures are your main offense. You'd simply be overwhelemed if you attempted to fight by yourself. So it's in your best interest that you sit back and support your creatures with spells and reinforcements from a small distance. There are a wide variety of creatures at your disposal, from normal fantasy types, to strange and sometimes even silly looking ones.

The levels in Sacrfice are all huge outdoor environments, ranging from the cold plains of Thryhring, to the volcanic landscape of Helios. The engine does an awesome job with the graphics, as you can see from the screenshots. They are all detailed with plants, hills, and small villages, complete with villagers waiting to be sacrificed. I can't think of any other RTS game that really compares with Sacrifice's graphics. The spell effects (especially the high level ones) are awesome...I'm thinking along the lines of Tornado. As creatures go further away from you, the game scales back on their detail to keep your game running smoothly. I understand the reason for this, but sometimes you catch this happening, and the creatures are turned to nothing more than stick figure look alikes.

The music in Sacrifice, while not bad, is somewhat forgettable. Each realm has it's own theme, which plays over and over during your mission there. These are done by an orchestra, which sounds mostly like percussion and horn instruments. It does have a sort of medieval spell casting sound to it. The sound effects in the game however are excellent...Sounds for the spells have the appropriate 'kick' to them which makes them feel a bit more powerful. Every creature has it's own set of voice acknowledgements, and you can even annoy them like in Blizzard's games.

You control your character with your keyboard, and issue commands with hotkeys, and the mouse. The icons at the bottom-left represent your spellbook, while the meters at the top-right show your mana and health levels, as well as how many souls you have. There's also a minimap to keep track of your units and structures. Thankfully, you can assign groups of creatures to hotkeys, that way you can pick them out in the heat of battle, as battles tend to be quite hectic. You can create your own hotkeys for spells, and formations, and a few other things as well. Even though you can zoom the camera in and out, and adjust it's direction, there are times when your own troops, especially flying ones, block out a big part of the screen.

Multiplayer is fun too. Here you can play as one of the many wizards that appear throughout the game. I haven't tried playing it over the internet, so I don't know about the netcode, but I have no problems over LAN. You can team up with people, or the computer, and play different kinds of games. Skirmish is your normal defeat the opposing team type thing, while the others require you to get a certain number of kills (Slaughter), manaliths (Domination), and souls (Harvest). Aside from different game types, there's a bunch of different options to tweak. Once you've finished the single player campaign you can create a custom made spell book, instead of sticking to one god's set of spells. One complaint I have for multiplayer is the computer is just really freakin easy. Aside from increasing the amount of damage the computer does, I'm not sure if you can increase the difficulty...But this is just an unfair advantage that is still very beatable. (If you can help me out, e-mail me).

I loved the little touches that Shiny Entertainment added to Sacrifice. At a glance, it might seem like a pretty serious game, but it's not entirely. Not all of the gods are entirely serious...Hell, Stratos is a freakin balloon with a face drawn on it. Even the creature's add to the game's humility. The cute sounding Slyphs for instance, with their "Ookeyzz!!" and the Flame Minions with their "Fire...Fire! AHAHAHA". Don't get the wrong idea though, some of the gods and creatures are quite serious. Also, while loading saved games, since your character is telling a story, you hear him go "Where was I...Ah! Yes...", and when you die then restart the level, he says "Of course...that's not what -really- happened. Let me start over...". Once you finish the game you have a choice of watching an amusing movie of the wizards and characters fooling around. It's a little long, but still a nice tidbit.