Sacrifice is by far one of the most innovative games ever made. Hell, I think it is one of the best games EVER.
First off, the graphics. They are simply excellent. Not only are the graphics well done, the art direction in this game is almost unrivaled. I have not seen a game as unique in its appearance as this one. The wizards and creatures are all incredibly well done and I guarantee you that you will not find such units looking like this in any other game. The terrain is smooth and detailed, and the world looks genuine.
Then comes the sound. Again, the sound and music in this game is top notch. In fact, I am tempted to say this game has some of the best music in video game history, and I am 100% positive that the voice acting is the BEST in all of media history, even beating Frank Welker as Megatron. Seriously, the audio in this game is pure 100% quality and sheer brilliance.
As for gameplay, well its just EXCELLENT. The singleplayer campaign is unique in its presentation. The gamespot review details this in more detail. All I am going to add is that you can technically have five campaign in one if you do all the missions with one god. Each god's campaign has a unique twist on the main story, and from what I remember after playing this game so many times is that very few of the missions are exactly alike. Yes, most of them involve defeating opposing wizards, but each mission has some other little objectives or twists that make almost every mission memorable.
The AI is for the most part pretty good, though they do not use all the spells at their disposal, and their creature choice is somewhat odd at times. Still, I must confess that if the AI was smarter this game would be nearly impossible to finish.
The multiplayer is pretty dead unfortunately. This is not battle.net. There are some players out there though, so if you really want you can find some people to play with. However, I do not think multiplayer is this game's strong point. As said in the gamespot review, the soul economy can quickly become a slippery slope.
One of the problems with the game is that it is difficult to command your creatures with the view. This is an additional point that makes multiplayer even worse. In singleplayer you really don't need to command your creatures all that much. Trust me, I've beaten this game with all five gods multiple times.
Since I have heard this game can be extremely difficult for some people (some reviewer said they were in a stalemate for 6 hours), I am going to include a brief little hints section here. This is what worked for me.
First off, the first battle between you and the enemy wizard is THE most important battle. It is important that you NEVER lose any souls in the initial battles. You always start off with less souls than the enemy, and if you lose any souls in the first battle, the rest of the mission will be incredibly difficult.
Second, there is very little use for the guardian spell in my experience. Your forces will be easily spread thin, and that is not good. If your manalith is being attacked, teleport to it. Zoom out of the minimap and teleport. In general, the artillery units are not very useful for you. They are the slowest in the game and pretty fragile. The enemy uses these a lot, but the enemy also starts off with more manaliths than you and more souls. If it suits your playstyle you can try to use artillery units if you want, but I have had difficulty using them with much success. The only time I use artillery units is in the later missions when I am almost winning the game but the last few manaliths have dozens of guardians or whatever. Another unit that has limited usefulness are the flying melee units such as the ikarus, pyrodactyl, blight, gremlin and seraph. If you have really good reflexes you can use these units extremely well with their special abilities, but for the regular folk these units do not win battles. They have low health and die extremely easily. The enemy sometimes uses these units to attack your manaliths. They have high attack so your manalith will usually be destroyed pretty quickly, but this tactic is usually used when you're winning, so you should be able to spare either some souls to attach 1 soul ranged units to your manaliths or just let the manalith die. You should have a lot of them anyway. In addition, the majority of you army should be the strongest unit available. Don't bother playing this as an RTS, just tell your creatures to guard you. For each type of creature, make a control group and give them a certain position. I recommend 4 manahoars in phalanx formation, ranged units in semicircle formation, flying units in semicircle formation, and everything else in line formation. Later in the game when you have extreme amounts of souls, (like 12 flyers, 12 ranged and a lot of melee) take your strongest unit group and put them in phalanx formation and use them as a death squad. Yes, 12 ents works. This obviously isn't everything that will make you win, but its a good starting point. For me, the easiest god to win with was James. Choose all the good choices and you'll have a dragon as an ally for the entire campaign with James, and this makes the game SOO much easier. For most missions just tell the dragon to attack the enemy wizard. For around 6 missions you'll have no problems. Pyro is the hardest to win with in my opinion. His creatures have high attack, but until the last 2 missions most of them die extremely quickly. With charnel its a pretty difficult game as well, but spamming animate dead should help turn things in your favor.
There are certain missions which for some reason are incredibly difficult. With stratos there is a mission where you have to keep hachimen and buta busy. This mission is murder. I only managed to beat it once, then my patience died. Don't hurt yourself on this, if you're not getting anywhere, just cheat. Another mission which is pretty difficult is a charnel mission where you fight the pyrodraulic dynamo. This mission is beatable, but it takes some luck and LOTS of speed. Save often in this mission. There are times when you are not able to teleport in time from being killed by the volcano, and that usually means you lose, especially in the early part of the mission. In the beginning try to build as many manaliths as you can while at the same time summoning creatures to use up all your souls. Don't bother attacking the dynamo until late game. The second to last pyro mission is pretty brutal as well. Usually the only way I can win is by stalling by casting volcano as a temporary "wall". The enemy always runs away from volcano. I don't want to spoil too much though, but stalling will make the mission easier. :) In one case the mission became easier because one of the triggers wasn't triggered. If you can avoid triggering a wizard in that mission, it makes things MUCH easier. I think it has to do with the way the AI works, but I'm not too sure. In any case, none of the missions are impossible, and I am not a pro nor am I very good at games. Just learn the tricks in the game and that's all it takes.
You probably won't find this game in stores nor anywhere else for that matter, and the company that made it no longer exists. What this means is:
Get this game any way you can. I am including piracy and copies here, because you're no longer stealing from the company, because it no longer exists. This game deserves to be played and enjoyed, and I recommend you do that.