Review #188: Gladiator Begins

 I am Spartacus!

 Where do I begin with Gladiator Begins? It's a rather peculiar fighting-slash-action-slash-Gladiator sim game in which you rise from slave to riches as you slay your way to the top of the gladiatorial ranks, and maybe eventually earn your freedom.

 There's only two modes: Story and Exhibition. Exhibition mode let's you battle against other players or CPUs, and while you can pick your character as 'random', you need a Story Mode save file in order to even access this mode. Story Mode is the real meat of the game, you are a slave bought by Margelius, your owner, and receive training in the ways of the Gladiator. As you play the game you'll interact with a number of NPCs, Gladiators, Patrons and some other high-ranking Romans. The story is surprisingly interesting, and there are a number of different sub plots of which you can follow through to the end, each one having a different ending. The characters and drama can be very cheesy, but it is interesting, Giulianus' rivalry was very over the top, but I was always looking forward to fighting him again and seeing what he'd say!

 At the start of the game you are allowed to create your Gladiator, it's a very limited character creator, but it's sufficient. Soon after, the game begins, and it follows a routine: Each day you begin at the Ludos, where you can save your game, allocate stat points in Strength, Endurance or Stamina, set up your four skills on the four face buttons and level them up if you want or set a nickname. After you are done with that, you are off to an arena, for the first few days, you'll won't be able to pick an arena, but after you reach 2nd rank, you'll be able to pick which arena to visit, each arena being owned by a different patron, so if you want a certain route/ending, you should make most of your visits to their arena. Each arena allows you to visit the armorer in order to buy, sell or refine equipment. There's a lot of pieces of equipment to put on your Gladiator, and you can also earn it after each fight. Every day there's a different set of  'battles' available, and there's decent variety: Team Battle, Survival, 1 on 1 duel, 2 on 2, Battle Royale and 'War', which are special scenarios. There's decent variety, but at the end of the day, you'll be doing the same thing: Battling arenas inside the ring!... most of the time.

 Battling is fairly interesting, each of the four face buttons attack a different limb, triangle attacks the head, square and circle attack the arms and X attacks the legs. You don't damage limbs, but focusing your attack on a limb will make their armor, or even their weapons fall, allowing you do deal damage by hitting those limbs. These holds true for the player as well, the CPU can remove your armor or weapons, but you can pick them up from the floor, heck, you can pick up their weapons and equipment... but they can do so as well. Holding the L button allows you to use whichever four Special Attacks you equipped on your gladiator, but these consume Stamina, which you have to keep in mind unless you want to be left open up for an attack while exhausted. Battling is very simple, and not very deep, but I liked it. It's a very repetitive game, but for some reason, I never got bored. It does have problem in the form of the camera, you can only rotate it by holding R and then using the face buttons, which is very cumbersome,  but pressing the X button while holding R makes the camera instantly move to your back, which was more than enough, as cumbersome as it was, the camera never cost me a match.

 There's four different styles: Single Weapon, Weapon and Shield, Dual Weapons and Pugilist. Each style is leveled up by using it(So even if you are using, say, two swords, you can drop one and instantly switch to single weapon style), which in turn unlocks more special moves for that style. The game is fairly meaty, there's a lot of stuff to do, and the four different routes ensure that replay value is fairly high. However, there is no "new game+", loading a clear file allows you to start anew on Normal or Hard, it would've been nice to be allowed to continue strengthening your gladiator. Another thing to keep in mind, is that there isn't much to do but fight, fight and fight, and for all intents and purposes, all arenas might as well be same. Loading times can be a bit intrusive at times, but you can install the game, and I suggest you do.

 The game looks amazing, character models are very detailed and look fantastic, the animations are fairly smooth as well. Some of the armor pieces don't look very convincing, but it didn't bother me much, plus, I could just cherry pick the ones I liked. The music is nothing special, but it's very fitting of the setting, it's the kind of music you'd expect on a Gladiator movie or series. Epecial mention goes to the sound effects, landing blows feels very satisfying.

 Gladiator begins is a fantastic game for the PSP, but I'm not sure if it's for everyone. There really isn't anything else to do but fight in enclosed arenas, and all fights boil down to either be the last man standing or surviving for a set amount of time. But if that sounds like your kind of game, by all means, it's worth it.
 8.0 out of 10