Gladius

It is not very often that you can find a treasure in your computer games stores bargain bin. But I picked up Gladius for $20 during my holidays, and this is such a rare gem. I got the Playstation 2 version, but the game also exists for the XBox and Gamecube, for around the same low price.

Gladius is a game from a very small niche genre, a tactical RPG. Most other games of this genre have "tactics" somewhere in their name, like Final Fantasy Tactics, or Dynasty Tactics. The backbone of the game is more or less a classical RPG, with character development, skills, and equipment, but battles take place on a chessboard-like grid, and the tactics of how you place your units there are very important.

In Gladius your main character is either the son of a gladiator in a pseudo-roman empire, or a barbarian princess with magical powers. Their stories become intertwined later in the game. In either case you are managing a school of gladiators. You start out with two gladiators (one of them being your hero), you can get up to 8 gladiators in the first quarter of the game, and up to 30 at the end. There are lots of different types of gladiators, in 6 different classes: light, medium, heavy, support, arcane, and beast. You can walk with your group on the world map, but the main action happens in the cities, where the arenas are.

In each city arena there are several leagues, each of them having several battles. Win all (or nearly all) the battles to win the league, win all (or nearly all) of the leagues to qualify for the local tournament, win all local tournaments to qualify for the regional tournament, which then opens up the next region for you. I'm 12 hours into the game, and I'm only half way through the first region, so this is not a short game.

The number of participants which you can put into an arena battle is fixed, and there are often additional conditions. You might be forced to use one male and one female gladiator, or only light and support gladiators, or only gladiators from a certain region. So you need to keep a mixed group of gladiators in your school, although you can hire some additional help temporarily for just one battle, if you can't meet the requirements otherwise. Winning a battle gives xp for the participants, and a few xp to the other gladiators in your school. You also get money, which you can use to hire gladiators or buy equipment. Win a league and you get even more money, and some equipment as prize. Some leagues also win you a special medal, which serves as entry ticket for other leagues. Other than that you can usually fight most battles in a region in any order.

There are different sorts of battles: A simple death match, king of the hill matches where you get points for keeping a certain position on top of a hill, a capture the flag like mode where you need to destroy the opponents monument, point fights where you get one point for every point of damage dealt, and a battle where you need to destroy more barrels than your opponents in a limited time. Up to now all my battles had 2 to 4 participants per side, with 2 to 4 schools participating, but that might get bigger later.

Heavy gladiators get a bonus against medium ones, medium gladiators have a bonus against light ones, and light gladiators have a bonus against heavy ones, in a classical rock-paper-scissor configuration. The other classes have other abilities, like throwing spears, or casting magic. Every time one of your gladiators gets up a level, he not only increases his stats, but he also gets skill points, with which he can buy special attacks and abilities. There are so many different abilities, that chosing the right gladiators makes all the difference for the different battles. Fortunately you can see what gladiators the other side is fielding, and if you lose a battle you can either reload, or just pay the entrance fee again to replay. Gladiators don't die in arena fights, local healers patch them up after the fight, but there might be random encounters later on the world map where you could actually lose them.

Combat is turn-based, but lighter and faster units get to act a bit more often than the heavier ones. Gladius is not an action game, there is a lot of thinking and tactics required. There is a small action component in that your attacks use a "swing meter", like in a golf game, and you can do bonus damage for stopping the swing at the perfect point. But I think I've seen a switch in the options that enables you to turn that feature off, if you don't like it.

Graphics are pretty enough, but not really special. Unfortunately the PS2 version needs several seconds loading time every time you switch from one screen to another, which gets a bit annoying in the management phase of the game. But there is only one loading screen at the start of a battle, and somebody had the brilliant idea to put random questions and answers from the internal FAQ on that loading screen. As not many people read the manual before playing, being forced to read that FAQ really helps you to discover features you weren't aware of.

I'd recommend Gladius even at full price. For around $20 it is a real bargain, many hours of fun for little money. But of course you must prefer turn-based tactical combat to twitchy button mashing, there are probably a lot of people out there who don't enjoy this. It's a thinking man's game. Which explains the lack of publicity, and the low price.
- posted by Tobold @ 10:48 PM Permanent Link