User Reviews (1 - 11 of 28)

Show these reviews first:

Highest Rated
Lowest Rated Newest
Oldest Most Helpful
Least Helpful

GLADIUS IS AN RPG???????

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 1 / 30
Date: November 07, 2003
Author: Amazon User

I DON'T LIKE RPG'S BUT AS ALWAYS LUCAS ARTS MAKES IT BEAUTIFUL

Worst game ever played

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 1 / 4
Date: December 30, 2003
Author: Amazon User

Where do I even begin to explain how terrible this game is. First I'll start with the dialogue. I don't think they could have put less effort into it. What makes it worse is that they talk about 85% of the game just jabbering away in a monotone voices. I thought that I was gonna be running around killing guys in a wrestling game kind of way but with swords. Boy was I surprised, you make moves as if you are playing chess or something. You're character is stronger than everyone else so you just exchange blows with your enemy until he is dead and the only thing that plays as a variable is boxes, whoever is higher hits harder. I tried to get a little into the game before I made a judgement on it, but that didn't change my mind at all. If I haven't changed your mind yet, rent it from blockbuster they have it there. I do not doubt that you will be greatly disapointed with this terrible video game.

Decent concept, mediocre execution

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 2 / 7
Date: November 10, 2003
Author: Amazon User

I must say, this game is pretty fun. However, there are lots of little things that have decreased the enjoyability of my experience, this game definitely lacks polish.

The most critical thing for me here is the lack of stability. During the beginning of the game, it is very stable and fully playable; but the further I progressed, the more and more it crashed on me. It is very frustrating to lose the results of a 20 minute battle (assuming that you save between every battle) simply because the code just isn't robust.

There are plenty of other pet peeves that I have with the game, but they are relatively small, and numerous. This game is good, and I probably would've given it 4 stars if the stability wasn't so poor. Keep in mind, this is for the PS2 version, I do not know about XBox or Gamecube versions.

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.

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.

The title rhymes with Tedious

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 2 / 3
Date: May 04, 2004
Author: Amazon User

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.

Good Graphics, really slow play.

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: February 23, 2004
Author: Amazon User

I rented this game when it first came out. It is a decent RPG. The problem that I had with it is that all the arena look exaxtly alike. There is very little variation from town to town within the game. Although the character development is a bit tedious it is very in depth. I love RPG's for the story aspect. This one has a pretty good story. Overall, I would say that it is OK. It certainly is not a Knights of the Old republic or a Final Fantasy.

Slow play

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 0 / 1
Date: January 04, 2004
Author: Amazon User

Maybe it's just me but I felt like the battles were a bit to slow to me. There is a very nice story line in this game no matter which character you choose to start with, but it almost seems like more thought was put into the story than in the method of combat. Don't get me wrong I like the game I just think the combat could have been done diffrently to help give it the excitement it was appearently ment to have. The slowness of game play just seemed to cause me to lose interest a little sooner than I would have otherwise.

Just my 2 copper. If it helps great if not... *shrug* can't please everone.

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.

Strategy, role-playing, violence...everything but a plot.

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 10 / 10
Date: January 19, 2004
Author: Amazon User

Actually, my title is misleading. It has a plot. But this isn't what I've come to expect. If, in the beginning of FF7, the narrator explained in overdramatic tones who and what Cloud was, what Sephiroth was planning, and constantly hinted that Aeris was going to die, who would give a rat's rear end about the plot? That's what they did with Gladius. I kid you not.

Narration aside, this is an awesome game. Anybody who loved playing FF Tactics is probably going to like it (although it's much, much easier than Tactics.) It's NOT an action game. It's a strategy RPG. Expect some battles to take a while.

I expected the wide variety of classes and huge number of weapons to be worthless baggage, but LucasArts seems to have balanced the game well. It's decently complex wihtout requiring you to memorize the inch-thick manual that comes in the DVD case.

Of course, too much of a good thing can get annoying. You travel around the world and fight in many arenas, but it's pretty much all the same. A decent grasp of basic tactics will see you though the whole game. Paper beats rock, rock beats scissors, scissors beats paper.

I noticed someone else complaining about enemy AI. They're right. The computer is STUPID. You can set up a beautiful, classic defensive formation, with archers ready to rain down death and soldiers guarding them, and the enemy will blindly charge at you. Even weak, arcane classes that the tutor character Usus claims should 'hang back and pelt the...gladiators with spells' will try to beat an ogre to death with their staves. However, the head-to-head option is pretty darn cool, as is the in-game multiplayer support.

My biggest complaint: replayablilty. There isn't any. When I spend fifty bucks, I wanna be seriously entertained. And while Gladius is addictively fun, the plot isn't going to draw me back. Niether is the character development system: by the time you've beaten one of the character's games, you've used every skill and every class that exists. They could take a serious lesson from Dungeons and Dragons.

All in all? Fun game. If you're thinking about getting that sacrelige FFX-2, blow your fifty bucks here instead.

Review Page: 1 2 3 Next 

Actions