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Gladitorial combat at it's best

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: April 22, 2008
Author: Amazon User

This is one of the few gladioator type games I like. It's a fantastic game. I can not believe there is no sequal to this game.
This is a gladiator turn-based RPG game. The leveling up is great. The battles are like Knights of the Old Republic(how you choose what ability you use) and chess(sans the restricted movement).
You choose from over 14 realistic classes (such as a legionare).The one thing I don't like about this game is that you can only have 20 people max.What kind of gladiator school is that!?
Oh, by the way,this game isn't a total gore fest like some people say. The goriest parts are the drawn cutscenes.There is a little blood in the battles.
This is a fantastic game.I'd reccomend it to anyone who likes RPGs and Gladiators.

Great turn-based strategy and little else.

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: April 07, 2007
Author: Amazon User

I really enjoyed this game for its turn-based strategy. While the strategy here is not as complicated or in-depth as say, Final Fantasy Tactics, it is fun and engaging to play. The only real problem with the strategy is that because of how the leveling up system works, character choices in the context of skills become less and less relevant as the game goes on. What I mean by this is that at the beginning of the game there are far more skills than points that you have to buy with them. But as the game goes on you end up getting enough points to buy basically everything that is possible. What this means is that for both you and your opponents the uniqueness of your character disappears because by the end of the game every character already has so many of the same skills. This problem could have easily been taken care of by reducing the number of average points throughout the game, or at least during the second half. This is a significant balancing flaw that should not have been overlooked.

As for the rest of the game, there simply isn't much there. The videos are boring, the voices are mundane, and the plot is paper-thin. Microsoft seemed to put its heart into the strategy portions of this game and skimped on everything else.

All in all this is a great game if you love turn-based strategy and a not-so-great game if you don't.

Even so, given that there are almost no strategy games like this anymore, and Microsoft has no plans to make a sequel, strategy lovers should pick this one up without a thought.

There need to be more games like this

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 2 / 2
Date: March 01, 2007
Author: Amazon User

This game is great. It may not be for everyone, but I love it and everyone I know who even remotely enjoys strategy games has fun playing it. I own it for the XBox, but I sold my Xbox to get an XBox 360 and the game is not backwards compatible. When I found out it was coming out on the PS2 I had to order it. My roommate has a PS2 and we both can't wait to play it again, despite the fact that we've each beaten the game twice. To me this game is an instant classic. I played over 150 hours my first time through, and I'm looking forward to a third time through. The turn based strategy gameplay is like a complex game of chess (except way more entertaining), and the meter and button combo style special moves are a refreshing change of pace and add chance and excitement to the battles. Eventually you get so good at the meters that it's second nature and you learn the best army to take against the opposition, but it still retains it's fun factor. Repetition is inevitable, but the complexity of the characters and classes, as well ad the relative open-endedness of the storyline make this easily one of the top ten all-time games I've ever played.

Awesome Game

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 2 / 2
Date: June 23, 2006
Author: Amazon User

This is one of those games you set the school/work clock ahead on friday to get home early for. The story line is well thoughtout and the graphics/portraits are amazing. Great by that is well worth the money.

Fun but gets boring

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 5 / 8
Date: July 19, 2005
Author: Amazon User

When you first play the game, it is fun to use your moves, recruit people, and buy weapons and armor. As you play more and more you find yourself getting bored because you use the same moves over and over. You can buy new move that do alot of damage but you can use weak moves and still win because its easy. The end of the game is hard but its too hard. When you first play the game it will be alot of fun but once you beat it or played it alot, it gets very boring. There are cool things in the game like customising your gladiators, using affinity moves, and the combo moves are cool but like I said it will get boring. Rent it before buying it.

i got bored very quickly.

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 2 / 9
Date: July 13, 2005
Author: Amazon User

let me start off saying that this was an impulse buy. on the back, it had a rating of 9/10 from game informer, and it was made by lucasarts, a company i trust, so i thought, "okay i'll get it." big mistake. I played it as soon as i got home, expecting a fighting game where you could actually control how the character fights and moves. but instead it's a game where the characters move in an almost chess-like manner. and the dialogue is very very slow. luckily, i also bought LOTR The third age, where you can at least go through the game without menu-surfing 24/7.

Very fun and well done

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 2 / 4
Date: April 04, 2005
Author: Amazon User

To start, this game is listed as an RPG and while it is most certainly that, it is a turn based RPG, which means that players take turns on the battlefield plotting out their moves, attacks, spells etc. If you've ever played Final Fantasy Tactics on PS1 and liked it, then you will like Gladius. If you aren't a fan of those games and are buying this game because you expect a Final Fantasy type of game then I'm afraid you will be disappointed. That being said, on to the game. The game starts off a little slow with some tutorials on how to adjust to the battle system and flow of the game. Luckily, if you have played it and know what you're doing or just want to figure it out for yourself, you can skip through most of it fairly quickly. The graphics are fairly good--the people and the beasts look pretty realistic. There is a lot of customization in the game --you can choose where to put skill points and like Final Fantasy Tactics the armor you wear will also improve your HP on top of leveling up. The strategic gameplay on the battlefield is also very fun and simple to learn, although I really don't use the affinity system much myself and am probably missing out, but I succeed anyways. The game is a game that you can easily put down and then come back to and it's not so addicting that you'll waste your life away playing. I find that its a very fun game to play leisurely when you have a half an hour to kill or more. You can play it battle after battle if you want. So to be brief, I will give the pros and cons in a list:
Pros
-Very fun gameplay that is easy to learn
-Lots of characters to recruit for your school for a changing face in the gameplay
-Customize the colors of skin, hair, and outfits of your gladiators
-Story that is not too deep but well enough written to move the plot along
-Lasting fun

Cons:
- Corny voiceovers and dialogue
- Battling gets tedious sometimes

So there you have it. This is a good game that is pretty cheap right now and if you are fan of tactical games like I am, go ahead and pick it up! I promise you won't be disappointed.

Turn Based Combat Gladiator Style. Woot!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: January 31, 2005
Author: Amazon User

This game is turn based combat. If you don't know what that means, you may not like it, ok. However, if you think that Front Mission 3 was one of the best games back on the PSone, or Advance Wars is some killer GBA action, then you just might be very pleased with this.

I've only played to the Egypt like land in the Viking gal half of the game, which I assume is about 75%. That's about 60 hours of play.

This game differs from Front Mission 3 or Advance Wars is that this is with Gladiators. And you're fighting in arenas. Characters level up, you buy new and better equipment, and recruit and expel fighters from your school.

The graphics are good. The load times are acceptable, and it's also nice that questions from the FAQ are presented during load times. Combat is tense at times, or overly easy at other times. And, even though I have 20 gladiators in my party, I really tend to use a core five or six mostly. And these actually aren't the main characters in the game either.

With it selling for $10 used here on Amazon right now, anyone who likes strategy or knows they like turn based combat, this shouldn't be missed.

Fun for awhile, but the lack of difficulty gets old quick

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 2 / 2
Date: October 01, 2004
Author: Amazon User

I have to admit, when I stated playing the game, I enjoyed it very much. At about the halfway point, I started getting irritated and now I am playing just to get to the end.

There is minimal story, which is fine, especially since I just finished Xenosaga and the last thing I want is a lot of clips. If you're really into customization, you can do everything from change the color of the character's skin to choosing abilities for them to learn. The strategy potion of the game is well developed. Strategy has been incorporated into the landscape, with higher and lower ground, areas that cause status effects, and barriers. The character classes are diverse, each with their strengths and weaknesses and their own customizable abilities. Even deciding which battles to enter, who to enter, and where to place your characters on the battlefield takes a certain amount of thought. As expected, good use of your powers and abilities during battle (because you are limited in what you can do and how often it can be done), as well as good choices as to placement will get you far. You get to be involved in the battles by trying to make critical hits by doing various different things with the gamepad. You might have to match buttons or try to get a slider to stop on a particular spot. Things that generally aren't too difficult to do, but you will mess up now and then. You even have to worry about the spectators. If they like you, certain stats will increase, if they don't, then they're probably rooting for your opponents. Sounds like a great strategy game so far, but wait... onto the bad.

The battles are often unnecessarily slow. If the speed of walking was just increased slightly, I think it would probably cut out a few hours of playing time. And sometimes it takes forever for characters to take their turn, especially the summoners. Most of the turns go fairly quickly, but after you've seen the move a few hundred times, you'd really just rather get on with the game.

The pace of the battles isn't a deal breaker. The main problem with the game is that it is just too easy. It gets repetitive because you do the same thing over and over and over and you rarely lose a battle... in fact, most of the time your opponents fail in defeating just one character in your group. This isn't a game like FF, where you have to restart if you lose a battle. Your characters don't die if they are defeated. You are expected to lose battles and then you simply try them again. There will be the occasional battle that requires a bit of effort, but you will never have to attempt a battle more than twice. I feel as though the game probably wouldn't be as repetitve if the opponents were a better match. The game does a good job of providing different types of battles, it just happens that it is so easy, it often doesn't matter what you do.

The game would be amazing if the AI was a bit better. I haven't played against a person yet, but I'm glad the ability to do that is there. It is this feature that kept me from giving the game a three star rating. This feature takes away the major downfall of the game... that is, unless you have idiots for friends.

Fun, and Repetitive

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 2 / 4
Date: July 19, 2004
Author: Amazon User

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.

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