Was it worth 80 cents?

Now Unlike prostitutes, when you buy a video game you don’t always get what you pay for. There’s a good chance that when you spend $50 on a romantic evening with Tripod Trixie, you’ll not only find out why she’s called “Tripod”, but also get a lovely parting gift that’ll require a few shots of penicillin and bottle of irish whiskey that’ll kill the parts of your brain that can remember your evening.

Spending 1 or 2 dollars on a budget indie video game, on the other hand, may get you a piece of garbage, or you’ll find something that you really enjoy your time with. The same can also be said about the $60 or $70 games (show pictures of Avengers and Miles Morales).

With all that said I got Gladiator: Blades of Fury for 80 cents. Can you even buy anything for 80 cents anymore? Maybe some of those cheapie candies at Cracker Barrel. So yeah, 80 cents this game was on sale for on the Playstation Store’s indies sale and really, as long as the game even starts I think I get my 80 cents worth.

So Gladiator, thankfully, has nothing to do with the movie. It’s more of a 3D arena style fighter. The single player mode is a tournament mode where you get to pick a really ugly character from 4 different classes and fight your way to become the ugly champion. The classes are barbarians, knights, assassins, and dwarves. If you’re the one person out there who cares about this, you can look over each of the characters’ stats, but beware, because this means you’re the most boring person to ever live.

There’s also an measurement for experience that was partially filled for each character, and I don’t know what that goes to. Is that their experience in being a barbarian? Maybe a new assassin recruit has less? That’s a secret that’ll have to die with the developers because it’s more rewarding to pull weeds in my backyard than find out. I honestly can’t really tell you what the difference is between any of these classes outside of maybe how their special moves work.

For this review I chose the knight Sir Lyonel, because I like knights, and this one has a look on his face like he’s trying to pass a kidney stone or he’s watching a horrible accident that’s about to happen. Also his avatar pic has his mouth closed, so I feel like something interesting happened in between the picture being taken and the game being finished that made him look this way. Either way he is the standard that I will judge all future knights in video games by.

Also I’d like to give some honorable mentions to characters like Shadow Stalker, who’s hand is clipping right through her axe, Ironhide, who looks like the black knight from Monty Python, and Crimson Flow, whom I believe only fights women once a month.

So after you’ve picked your afterbirth of a character, it’s basically just 10 matches, each being best 2 out of 3 to make it to the top and be the champion. The game was running fine but was just ugly up until this point, and now that we’re actually going to play the game, this is where everything shits the bed with the most reckless of abandon.

So you get dropped into the arena at one end, with your opponent on the other. At first glance you’re thinking “oh, it’s one on one fighting”, but no, it’s not. There’s a 3rd combatant, and it’s the drunken camera watching all the action.

Before starting, the camera likes to pan the arena – badly, I might add – and then it’s supposed to focus on your fighter. Well, Gladiator likes to surprise you by not even focusing on you half the time. Sometimes it’ll go behind the shoulder of your opponent and make you feel like you’re actually playing as them, then snap over to your character at the start of the match as if it forgot what it’s doing.

The camera will get stuck on walls or not be able to keep up with what’s going on, and looks a lot like it’s centered on the back of your character instead of above the shoulders or head. So if the enemy is too far away, you’ll have a hard time figuring out where they’re at. Also hitting the special attack button makes the camera want to correct itself, so pressing it repeatedly makes you feel like you’re starting to have a seizure.

You character also has a *really* hard time focusing on your enemy, and the computer will pretty much constantly circle you so that you can’t land a hit on them. You can remedy this by locking onto them – this will help you land about a third of your attacks instead of none of them.

You character also has a *really* hard time focusing on your enemy, and the computer will pretty much constantly circle you so that you can’t land a hit on them. You can remedy this by locking onto them – this will help you land about a third of your attacks instead of none of them. I figured out early on that if you try to stick to a wall and the camera decides to not get stuck, that it’ll prevent the computer from trying to constantly move around you and make it easier to land a hit on them. It’s a simple strategy, yes, but I’m still proud of myself for figuring it out.

The arenas serve their purpose, though a few of them are just reskins with the same layout. I did find that for arenas that have an edge to them, that a ring-out is possible, but it took the computer accidentally walking off the edge, not being able to walk back toward me, then they eventually fell.

You have a basic attack, a special attack, and a kick to damage your opponent. You can also block, do a really slow cartwheel that as far as I can see serves no purpose, and you do what I can also describe as a rock star slide, that also doesn’t seem to do anything. As I said before, most of these attacks don’t land and you’ll spend more time accidentally hitting your opponent than anything else. There’s no technique to fighting in this and you just want to whittle your enemy’s health down before they whittle yours down. Sometimes I’d land something that did a lot of damage, but hell if I know what it was. Also there’s a few characters that had the same move sets, which is always lazy. Winning a match gets you a close up of your fighter with really bad lighting so that most of the time you can’t see their face.

In addition to the camera working against you, you’ll find that this game has more slow-motion than anything I’ve ever played in my life. You can do a special attack without your enemy near you, and it’ll randomly go into slow mo. Decide to jump towards your enemy as they’re attacking? Time for some slow-mo! Or who knows, maybe it’s not slow mo and the game’s engine just can’t handle doing anything. That’s not totally out of the question either.

It’s not a very difficult game, and playing on normal, I didn’t notice any enemies getting harder as I climbed the ladder to success. When I got to the final fighter, who was just another playable character, I whooped his ass pretty handily and got what is probably the best ending screen in a fighter I’ve ever seen. Your figher is standing on a lone slab stone, and you have flowers being tossed at you from thin air. That’s it. That’s the whole game. For you people that like trophy hunting, I unlocked most of them in my first playthrough and then of the 2 left, one was for playing 100 rounds, and I could only do that on a dare where there was a bottle of really expensive booze or several complimentary visits to a therapist after I did it.

You’d think that was it for the whole game, but wait, there’s more! Sort of. When you’re done playing single player and you’ve coerced someone into joining you, you can play multiplayer, and quick match. I personally couldn’t get anybody to try multiplayer with me, so when I moved over the quick match, I saw…the exact same screen as multiplayer. So I don’t know what the difference is and I have a feeling *you* don’t care, either. So moving right along.

In summary, yeah, I got my 80 cents worth out of it, but that’s about it. The game’s laughably ugly, which I find endearing, but the sloppy camera, the way-too-frequent slow-mo, and combat that needs an overhaul make it difficult to even recommend this as a joke game.