It’s hard to get your main characters killed, but not impossible. I did it 🙂 Gladius trades plot for deep strategical game play, and I’m there for it.
Given Gladius is from LucasArts, known for deeply cinematic games, I expected there to be a little more plot in the twin stories of two Vikings, or an Imperial gladiator, who build their gladiator schools from scratch until they are large enough to challenge the emperor’s best fighters.
Other tactics game introduce more fighters to your team as the story progresses. Not here. If you don’t recruit a fighter, they are not available to you. If you lose certain fights, some characters may never be available to you, and you’ll never know why.
The game is split into four chapters. New chapters open up after the regional championship is won in each area. My Viking twins started in Nordagh, and after winning the regional championship, were promoted from Amateur to Semi-Pro and are now in Imperia. Imperia is the starting zone for Valens, the lead for the other story in the game.
But all of this is just an excuse for tactical battles. There are a few standard fights — kill all enemies, protect your capture point while attacking your opponent’s, king of the hill, break barrels, do the most damage. Since these are gladiator games, Gladius takes pains to let you know that nobody is actually harmed in the games; healers bring everyone back to tip-top health after each battle.
This is true for battles that take place on the fighting grounds, anyway. Random encounters are a different story. If you are defeated in battle out in the wild, those characters are gone forever. If one or more of those were main characters, then the game ends. Winning a random encounter brings great rewards, but they cam be skipped if you don’t want to take the risk.
Since I am playing this game with an emulator, I can save the game instantly whenever I like. This is cheating, I know, but this is a hard game, so I’m learning to live with it.
Most fights can be won in many ways, with many different builds. Initial positioning is incredibly vital; you don’t want to ever get surrounded. That will mean instant death.
Most of the good attacks require a certain amount of elemental affinity (the swirly icons in the picture above show Urlan has two points of Wind Affinity), or action points (Urlan has five diamonds of action points available). Once you spend those points to start an attack, Gladius has another little twist for you: the swing meter.
The swing meter determines whether your attack or spell will land, crit, or miss entirely — and it’s entirely based on your reaction speed. It’s easily the most aggravating part of the game.
Basic attacks and combos have you press one or more buttons before the speeding cursor enters the miss zone. A four hit combo needs you to press given buttons precisely four times. Any miss ends the combo.
Spells require you to hit a narrow green area on the casting bar. Too fast or too slow means no effect. You have less than a second. It is FAST.
Other abilities require you to match several sequences of buttons before the cursor passes into the miss zone, and these are usually slow enough that I can manage a normal hit, and occasionally a crit.
For those who would rather not toy with the swing meter, the game does allow you to turn it off. Every ability will hit as if it hit normally. You won’t miss, but you also won’t crit.
The rock-paper-scissors aspect of Gladius’ fighter classes can never be ignored. Heavy fighters WILL sweep the floor with your medium fighters. Medium fighters will ABSOLUTELY mess up your light fighters. Light fighters will attack your heavy fighters and they will not be able to return a blow. Most fights have a combination of fighter classes. The limits on the number of fighters you can have in your fighter school, plus the cost to gear up a lot of fighters, means you will always be making tough decisions about who to bring and who to leave behind.
You are able to see who your opponents will be before starting a fight, and there’s no real repercussions to losing an arena fight, aside from the entry fee.
I’m 20 hours in, and a quarter of the way through the game. This is a game I’m going to see through. I’ve been streaming the game occasionally on Twitch, too.
