
The Ultimate Gladiator Simulator. Fight & strategize through spectacles and arenas. Rise from slave to Champion and earn your freedom or... die trying. This Gladiator RPG Roguelite features in-depth career management and unique physics simulated combat. Those who are about to die, I salute you!
Most likely between $4.3M and $12.1M. On 8 games checked against developer-reported sales, our median error is 11%. How we estimate →
Reviews
Themes across 848 recent reviews and how positive each mention is. A keyword signal, not full sentiment analysis.
positive critical· bar length = how often the theme comes up
Reviews
This game intersects a lot of genres and gameplay mechanics that I dig. Single life roguelite gladiator game with Mount and Blade style combat? Pretty much tailor made for me. After twenty hours, I've learned how to pace myself, take easier, low risk fights, slowly improve my stats and equipment, pick the right perks to create a great build, chip away at whatever victory condition your poor hapless gladiator's backstory requires, and yet, once in a while, I'll still fly too close to the sun if the prize for a fight is tempting enough and meet my grisly end for the sake of public entertainment. Live or die, intra-life progression could be fleshed out a bit, you can leave some equipment for your next gladiator to inherit if you bite the dust, and some tournament and event rewards leave you with a percentage bump of money you pass down to your next character, but that's about it. There is no Hades level narrative thread that keeps you engaged life after life, this very much a 'make your own fun' style of roguelite, which, in a game about several disparate and often short lived gladiators, I'm fine with. The joy comes from the combat and the between fight crunchy, number filled health, stat, and equipment management, and the risk vs. reward aspect embedded throughout. I do like the updates the game has gotten since I first purchased it, and look forward to full release. Even in early access I find myself finishing a run, whether through victory or death, and at a loss of what else to do, just start another run.
It's fun. If you've played games like mount & blade or mordhau, the combat system is similar and should be easy to pick up. Honestly it feels like playing the early game of M&B where you run tournaments to get better gear, but its the entire game, with some added resource management. Good job Jordy
Meh. Game has been in early access forever. No content in it what so ever. Feels like it was just released as a demo. Definetly not worth the price. The concept and the ideas in it are FANTASTIC but as it stands its just janky and empty. No item variety/no build variety/no upgrade variety/no content variety. Even for an early access, a roguelike should not be finished 100% on the first character....
IMO it's fun for exactly 1 playthrough and then there is little to no replay value. The combat is not great and that is like 90% of what you're doing.
Its great, coming from Half-Sword its hitting that itch. Also the developer is just a pretty cool dude.
This game plays like a more nuanced and dedicated mount and blade style tournament experience. It has a roguelite career management system, you pick fights, manage prestige and coin, and use resources to swing things into your favor. Each possible start comes with baked in penalties and boons as well as ultimate objectives. Acheiving those objectives results in permanent buffs to subsequent playthroughs. Also as you level you can unlock permanent buffs for future characters. An extra hundred gold for every character or an extra 100 prestige, or +.5 to all skills eventually adds up to be quite significant in the long term. One thing I really enjoy is the match modifiers. If you take a 1 vs many match, you get like 8x the stated rewards and if you have high fame at the end of the match, you might end up getting 100k prestige at the end of a match. And if you took the time to get your favor up with each patron, when you fundraise, that prestige might transfer to 60k cash and if you are lucky and got a discount, you can buy some golden tier equipment and get even higher modifiers and become a total beast in the arena. You can also take penalties to train up skills which then also level faster through use. All in all, it feels good to go from getting your butt kicked on the most basic enemies to end up screwing around through harpoons and kicking people into traps so the crowd loves you. Some of the starts are pretty awesome as well. The blacksmith one was very satsifying as it encouraged getting premium equipment and a ton of slots and just repairing them at all times. My character ended up fully decked out and I was one shotting most guys with a giant ornate spear and golden lion armor and shield and an entourage wearing the same.
Hats off to the solo developer for all the work he's put in. It's incredible how far the game has come along. Great game, I can definitely recommend it. A couple points of feedback (if interested) that would be nice before release: - Steam achievements are non negotiable - The fame multiplier is kinda broken? Short matches can be very difficult to earn fame in the allotted time despite constantly hammering enemies, while longer matches (like tournaments) have you at the highest fame level the entire time even if you wait around doing nothing and get booed by the crowd. - Certain weapons just feel much harder to land good hits with (any spear like weapon, it could be a skill issue on my side, but I'm never even close to the consistent damage output a sword would do). - Having different legendary gear sets would result in more interesting builds rather than the current single option. Edit: Oh come on, achievements would be fun :D
The game *WAS* great, but patch 0.85 completely killed the fun. AI is awful now, fighting against multiple enemies has become a game of "how long can you last until they delete your stamina and kill you" (spoiler: 10 seconds at best, 15 if you're lucky) — just give up on winning, you simply won't. The new camera changes, which were completely unnecessary, make combat feel claustrophobic and even more clunky than it already was. And yes, we're technically on v0.87 now, after two patches that were supposed to address the problems that v0.85 introduced. Well, they did absolutely nothing. The only people I'd recommend this game as it is are masochists who are interested only in restarting your runs over and over again without having any real chance at winning one. For everyone else, just wait until 1.0 comes out and hope the game's back to being enjoyable by then.
Fun to play for maybe an 1 hour, but after that, it's quite boring. If it's on sale, I would say to get it and try it out, but at full price, no, give it a skip.
I still don't fully understand how this game works, but you can chop someone in half and they ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ ragdoll like halfway across the arena sometimes like a bag, so that's sweet. Hell yeah, brother.