A great new Archon style game, great fun with multiplayer with a few missing features.
It gives a great combination of strategy with the placement of your troops, especially considering the different movement types(walk, fly, teleport) and the movement blocking ability of the 2 weak but useful units with the sentinel ability (which stops any enemy unit that walks into a square next to them), as well as action game play when two units fight. A battle can go either way in those fights - it does heavily favor both the more skilled player and the higher power unit. Some people can end up being experts in a certain unit - one of my friends can defeat anyone with the Cyclops unit, even though in most fights I can defeat him, I fear his Cyclops even with my most powerful units. There is a bit of randomness as well with the hazards in the battle arena - I have occasionally lost powerful units to weak units used by a lesser skilled player due to hazards, luck, and strategy(bad on my part or good on his). It always gets huge reactions from the players when an uneven match ends up with the underdog winning!
The large map adds extra strategy with temples that protect your unit from magic as well as slowly heal them, and give your god more mana for spells. Also there are Mana Wats that if you have a unit on them will give your god lots more mana per turn. Each hex on the map also has a purpose - each one will give advantages to one of the 4 elemental teams, to 2 of them, or to none. basically each square gives 0-2 bonuses, which can be all given to 1 elemental type, or split between 2. Placing your units on the correct hexes and picking your fights can really make a difference in battles.
as for the 4 elemental teams, each has its own units and attacks, the lower levels of units are rather similar, with some teams more similar that others. High powered units are mostly unique.
Arena combat gives each unit a light and heavy melee attack, and a light and heavy magic attack, and a special ability. There are a few magic attack types that reoccur alot, so once you recognize them, even if you cannot remember exactly which unit has what, you can glance at the manual chart of each unit to remember what kind of attack it is. For example, Magic Orb freezes and enemy and 4 water units have it, while anything with Beam in the name just does damage. Anything Blast is an area effect around the unit. The arena you fight in is based on the land type you fight in with various hazards that you have to use to your advantage. Fights can be won or lost due to the hazards on a map, from areas you move slowly through, to damaging areas. Each unit has health and energy bars - the more powerful units start with more of each, but health loss lasts from one fight to another. During a fight there are sometimes purple little towers that standing next to will recharge your energy - which is required for your magic attacks. So using the hazards and topology of the arena, plus using the energy replenishers is key to victory. In short, even the arena fights will favor the player with a better strategy.
If you like the combination of strategy and action, this is a great game for you, especially for multiplayer with friends - the single player is reletively easy unless you set the difficulty to the highest level. That is for single player battles - the campaign can still be hard as you have time limits and certain goals to accomplish as well.
There are only 3 problems with the game - two of which really should have been implemented, although maybe it would be easier on PC than Xbox.
The biggest problem I have with the game is that with the custom battle games, where each unit has a starting army and fights on a chosen map, you can select whether killing the enemies God will finish the game or not, but you CANNOT turn off the victory due to controling too many temples. To have an effective challenge with this game currently, I need to face multiple computer opponents, but if I control more than a couple temples I automatically win - and the computer doesnt fight to prevent that. But I want to control temples for the mana and magic immunity reasons. So its too easy to win using that method, I would like to be able to turn that victory condition off if I choose. The second problem is the inability to create a custom map. Granted with the way that the hexes are set to a certain land type depending on which players are playing where, it may be complicated but I can think of a way it could have been done in a simple enough method. Third, online play would have been nice, but with the action parts lag would be very painful.
In total, I have had a lot of fun with this game, its great for parties or having a few friends over to play, and its a must have for those who like strategy but also enjoy taking the fight into their own hands.