Reviews

• gamedeal user

  Nov 15, 2022

  Hey look it's the gladiator game I've been waiting for forever
• gamedeal user

  Nov 15, 2022

  So, I really like roguelikes and gladiator games so the premise of the game appealed to me. I'm not really one to purchase Early Access games but I was bored and figured I'd try it. First the tutorial: Super difficult to figure out the controls. They are very sensitive and ever movement, button, and click matters. I can barely hold onto my sword as I keep pressing the wrong button. I can only imagine how my Scollo views a new gladiator like me who keeps dropping his sword. Learn how to swing, how to stab, how to block, dodge, etc. Learn to throw weapons. Accidentally throw my ax backwards. Hope there isn't friendly fire in this game. (There is, I later learned.) Practice my first battle. Guy with a big stick keeps bonking me. He backs me into an early tutorial station and keeps bonking me as words appear on the screen. "Hold to increase the power of your attack." I try it and WHACK, a spray of blood from my opponents chest stains the training floor. Hell yeah. The game only gets better from here. In my debut match, I was super nervous, like NEO in the matrix attempting his first building jump. I take a few whacks but give as good as I get. Finally I manage to time a side swipe and decapitate my opponent. The crowd roars! I think I've won, but no, suddenly a squad of enemies charge out of the gate. Death is permanent so I run away. Just in time, my own team arrives behind me to guard my flanks. General melee ensues. I almost dead, my health is so low, but I stay behind my teams shield bearer. While one of the enemies is distracted facing away from me at a team mate, I stab him in the back, and he goes down. We win! The croad cheers in adulation. Gasping, out of stamina, I kneel in the blood soaked arena, grateful to Zeus and all the gods that I survived my first battle. Later, I learn that my master is so impressed, he gifts me a brand new shield. I save the game and exit to savor this moment of victory before the next battle, where permanent death may be waiting. I've only been playing for 25 minutes. I love this game!
• gamedeal user

  Nov 15, 2022

  Remember as a kid, sitting in that school library playing sword & sandals thinking how awesome it would be if that flash game was ever made into an actual in-depth title? Welp, this is it.
• gamedeal user

  Nov 15, 2022

  This is the gladiator game we've all been waiting for since PS2. You know the one..
• gamedeal user

  Nov 16, 2022

  Well. I've done it. I've beaten a Linolian Spearman using a Shield pan, and a regular pan. I've become the Pan god. Fear me. Gonna be honest, didn't think I'd like this as much as I do. Things I've learned: Watch your character during attacks. It's real important. Same for defending, watch your shield arm. Shove + stab works real well. You can hold attacks. Best results are spears with a held stab. Throwing an Axe requires an overhead swing. Throwing a Spear/Pillum is a stab. The initial point you click feels like it guides where you'll attack. Further out -> Higher up. In order, buy info, then healing, then training. Keeping your current character developing is better than starting again. Many vs many is the ticket, and don't fight fair. Duels are dangerous. Be aware of your gear; A starter mask can provide -90% to your fame income. This can hamper you. Entourage enabled missions only provide allies when you own the perk. Ignore otherwise. Bets are always 1,000 and can triple your gold for easy objectives. Carefully select them if you make it work. Fame and gold unspent is wasted. Weapons and armor lose durability. Repairs only work in your storage.
• gamedeal user

  Nov 16, 2022

  Overall, I like this game, so I'm going to recommend it. Though, there's a lot of frustrations, so the below list seems more sided towards the opposite. ## Pros ## - IMPRESSIVE work for a solo Dev - Fun to bash things - Feels really good to win, it can be quite difficult to do so - Rag-doll deaths make it funny when enemies die - I like some of the RNG aspects, like the gladiator's background, though there are some that are pretty heavy disadvantages, so a bit of balancing issues ## Cons ## - The biggest one is that the enemy CPU/AI is at a huuuuuuuge advantage. And I mean HUGE. --- They seem to have no stamina, meaning they can do everything you do infinitely while you can only swing or dodge 2-3 times then need to backpedal for 5 seconds to do so again. --- Bots have no cursor, so they can instantly block almost everything. It seems as if it rolls a random number and if it's even, they instantly block, if it's odd, they don't. --- Bots can sprint while charging an attack, you cannot --- Enemy teammate bots are much more cohesive than yours. Don't try to be smart and flank enemies, your teammate bot will just stare at the enemy's backside and never attack - often just running to find someone else to fight. --- Bots will pick up gear *instantly*. This doesn't seem like a big deal, but they will throw a weapon at you and the new weapon is already equipped before the first even leaves their hand. It is annoying difficult for you to pick up a weapon - your cursor must hover over it at a certain range, for a certain amount of time, and the mouse-over detection is very precise. If you're not on the *weapon* shaft/head itself, you're not picking that thing up. --- Bots are 10x better than you'll ever be at throwing weapons (admittedly I suck at it, but the controls for it are pretty hard to master - it'd be much more preferable to simply give a throw weapon command that throws it in a straight line, so you at least have to aim it, not time a release) - You get lower stamina as your health decreases, meaning it's difficult to turn the tide if you're already losing a fight, as you can only swing a weapon once, then wait 3 seconds to do it again - Blocking is rough. You have to line up your shield/weapon with theirs and it very rarely actually connects (bigger shields make it a lot easier but come with heavy stamina costs). Polearms are easier to block with and easier to block - The hit detection is about 40% accurate. Basically swing and assume it's just going to go through them without hitting them or hit their shield on their left arm even though you swung to hit their right and their shield never moved. - I have yet to see a 2H axe in the game - ever, by enemies or the shop alike. I currently refuse to believe they exist and it's honestly 85% of the reason I bought the game. - The shop costs are wayyyyyyyyy too high. Immediately upon the start of the game, you have between 0-1000 gold (unless you dumped gold from your previous character at a 10% rate). The common/crappy items are between ~250-2000, the rarer items are around ~1500-15000, and the legendaries seem to be >15000. I get that it's meant to be hard to obtain, but cutting shop costs by 50% would seem more attainable. Especially because your weapon/shield break after 3-5 fights, so you're constantly depleting what little funds you have to replace them unless you get lucky on "drops" in the fights where you get to keep gear. - I don't feel like there is any meaningful progression. So far, from what I can tell, you can get: --- Unlock up to 3 more fight choice slots (total of 4), these carry over so you don't need to repurchase. It's okay, gives you a slight chance that you can find a more favorable fight, but since they're almost always hidden, you have to spend 150-450 fame per slot just to see it each time unless you just want to gamble. --- That's about it. There should be a way to upgrade your Ludus so that your future gladiators are stronger - wouldn't that be the whole point? Even minor increments like using Fame to buy permanent upgrades to Health or Stamina or starting skill levels (1% HP/Stam per purchase, 1 skill level per purchase, all up to a cap of 50). Seems like this should have been an obvious choice, as right now you're not really rewarded for continuing the play the game after the first 2 hours, except to possibly give 10% gold to your next character, which is a pittance. It should do 10% automatically and you can dump up to 40% more. Since gear costs so much, you'd need to dump 100,000 gold to get 10,000, which will *almost* get you a stronger weapon - pending the shop RNG, of course, which is a 3/207 chance. - Some weapon attacks don't really make sense. For example, pulling a polearm right will do a wide swing from the right to the left. However, pulling it left will do a brief stab from the left. Pulling down on a polearm with do an odd stab-ish, thing. Pulling up should do an overhead chop, but instead it does a sideways cleave - or a forward stab, who knows? Double-click overhead chops will usually follow your cursor, which almost always turns an expected overhead chop into a diagonal slash/swipe, which isn't what you're wanting to do. Also, overhead chops typically get blocked by shields that are down at their waist. - You get disarmed randomly by attacking. I finally had a decent weapon and on my very first swing in a 1v1 match my dude just launched it outside the ring where it couldn't be recovered. - There are weapons on the ground that cannot be interacted with, so it's very misleading. You see a new sword or polearm on the ground and you're unarmed, so you run over to pick it up but you can't - it's fake. Due to the mouse cursor accuracy required, you usually sit there like an idiot for 3 seconds getting beaten on before you realize it can't be picked up. - You can't punch while unarmed. Honestly, this one is a major frustration. Your weapon breaks and/or you become disarmed *constantly* (disregarding throwing your weapon). You'd think you could at least bop some guys with your fists but no I think there's a few I'm leaving out, trying to recall everything that came to mind in the ~2 hours I played. Obviously, I haven't been playing long enough to experience what should, theoretically, happen as you progress more. But since it doesn't seem like you can progress anymore after you spend 30,000 fame to unlock the 3 fight choice slots, you're basically doing a fresh run everytime with no progression. A bit meaningless to not just go in, bash some people, then die, reset, and do it again. Combat is similar to Chivalry but a bit messier. I do enjoy it and think it's fun and has potential. My only issue is that, from what I've read on what's planned (haven't looked at the road map, only comments by the Dev) it seems like the game's mechanics are considered complete and won't be changing, which I feel they really need to in order to really shine. There's a lot of scratches to buff out, though I didn't encounter any bugs. Just mechanic issues that make it frustrating to play due to imbalances between you and enemies. It has to be hard to code artificial "humanism" into AI, so that they can't operate at levels impossible to humans, but adding delay timers, STAMINA at normal consumption and generation, etc. should do the trick. Basically, put them on even footing as the player, otherwise it's like playing Chess against a bot that can calculate every possible scenario. I'm curious to see if there will be any mechanical tweaks over the next year, though admittedly I'll lose interest in the next 48 hours (through no fault of the game), so I likely won't be around to see it. Hoping for the best for this game and the man who put in the time and effort to build it. It's something to be proud of, despite the giant list of Cons I placed above. I still recommend it to people as I think they'll have fun and it will support the effort involved and let it continue to grow.
• gamedeal user

  Nov 20, 2022

  One dev... 7 years... I mean.. WTF DUDE WTF! I was looking for a gladiator game since Spartacus. This is the game. Go. Buy it. Now.
• gamedeal user

  Nov 20, 2022

  Basically if you are interested in playing games like Gorn or Sword and Sorcery, but don't have a VR headset, this is pretty close. Also if you like the Mount and Blade combat and arena gameplay, you would like this game. Basically you control a gladiator and you play that one character until he dies, then you start again with a new character. There's a lot of mechanical depth, the combat is a bit fiddly but there's a lot of interesting mechanics that make the game interesting. It is a very physics based game, weapon damage is based on speed and the point of impact, so you won't do as much damage if you hit an enemy with the hilt of a sword instead of the blade. The more risk you take when you go into a match, the more money and fame you get. You also get a fame multiplier based on how aggressively you play in the fight. You use fame and money to buy new weapons and armour, heal your character, train to get more stats in exchange for lower stamina recovery, etc. It's a very good starting point. But as it's early access, there are things that need to be improved. Performance in general is not amazing. My computer isn't good, but it should be able to run the game at low graphics. But even then the framerate is getting hit a bit. Due to the physics based combat, there can occasionally be weird glitches with the player models getting their arms bent the wrong way. Stuff like that. Not a big deal, but can be distracting. But yeah, it's fun, and for a solo developer it is a great game. I'm looking forward to seeing how the game develops in the future.
• gamedeal user

  Nov 28, 2022

  A game which proves that one passionate game developer can create a better game than a multi-million dollar studio whose sole motivation is greed.
• gamedeal user

  Dec 1, 2022

  I say Many VS 1 is fair fight