fighting

Gladius is a Gladiator-like PlayStation 2 game developed by LucasArts. The premise of the great seemed like a winning combination of role playing elements and combat. The end result was a little boring and repetitive. Gladius is not that bad of a game - just time consuming.

Before you can really be able to play the game, you will spend about an hour going through an extensive training session that teaches you how to play. The game developers were kind enough to include every single instruction on gameplay into the game, so you don't even need to open the included instruction booklet. The problem this creates is you have to keep reading screen after screen of mostly redundant or self-explanatory instruction. Occasionally, the characters onscreen will have pointless mini-conversations that only slow things down more.

The game is played by going to different towns and fighting in their arenas. Some fights have entry fees, but the rewards are much greater if you win. After you have fought and won several smaller fights, you may compete in the town tournament. If you win that, then there is a town championship. With each fight you win, your respect in that town will increase. Higher levels of respect get you better prices on equipment and more choices for recruiting more gladiators to fight with you.

Your characters gain experience after each winning battle. Like any other RPG where you build up your characters, each level gained brings you more abilities and options to learn skills which help you in combat. The game also features 4 different nature Affinities: earth, wind, water, and fire. Choosing to follow a certain Affinity allows you special moves and more damage with weapons favored by that Affinity.

Once you make it past the obligatory training sequences, you will be able to walk around the land and visit a bunch of other cities and towns that have their own arenas and gladiators. Each environment and the included opponents are different, bringing some degree of variation to the game. However, combat is basically the same no matter where you go.

Combat in Gladius is turn-based, but most of the combat area maps are so small that there isn't really any room to develop a strategy. It comes down to moving and attacking and moving on. Whoever is strongest wins and that's pretty much it. You do have some skills and things you can use to best enemies, but you can guess the outcome of any battle just by looking at the average level of your opponents. All in all, combat plays like a glorified board game.

The name Gladius rhymes with the word tedious. That's called irony. Each combat session requires you to watch a 10 second overhead view of the arena at the start and end of the battle. This combined with loading times makes each fight take about a minute to start, not counting the actual combat. During combat, you get to see the same animations over and over again so much that you ignore them. When it comes time for your move and you choose to attack, your only interaction is a swing meter than functions like what is used in a lot of golf games. You have a bar with some markers on it and you try to hit your X button when the fast-moving cursor goes over certain markers. It couldn't be any more simplistic.

All in all, Gladius is actually kind of fun to play. I am one of those people who obsess over games where you can level up your characters, so I keep making myself play just to see how much I can build up my people. This is really nothing more than a board game with a few extras.

I had fun playing Gladius for PS2. The graphics, story, and gameplay were all well-done. I think the voice-acting was a little wooden at times, but it didn't detract significantly from the game experience.
The thing that really stands out in the game is the strategic element. Learning to use the various classes in the proper way, as well as taking advantage of terrain variations,takes a bit of time, but it is necessary to be successful.
The reason I didn't give the game 5 stars is because the enemy AI in the game often did some pretty inexplicable things. For example, archers will often fire an arrow up into the air instead of defending themselves, even if they are really close to getting split in to by the nearest axe-wielding Samnite. And with free-for-all battles, one usually needed to merely stay put and wait for all the enemies to wipe each other out before mopping up the beat-up survivors.
I thought that the game got fairly easy after the battle with those three goons right after winning the Imperial Championship, but the end made playing through the story worthwhile. Overall, it's a great game.

I've been playing Gladius for a little over a week now, and when I first began playing I could not put the controller down, after turning the game off last night I have not been able to bring myself to turn it back on. The gameplay is your normal stategy type RPG, the voice over acting is so bad it's actually funny. The fact is this game is not very challenging at all, as an avid RPG fan the fact that your charecters cap at level 13 is very frustrating. Random encounter are virtually non existent, One good thing about this game are the charecters each have there own distinct advantages and disadvantages, the skills are excellently done with one gripe that you can't unlearn any skills if you decide they stink which a few do, stay away from combo 1 and save for combo 2 you'll use that more often. Overall this is a fun game for about 30 hours of play it becomes extremely repetitive midway through.