Story of a Gladiator is a fairly ironic title for a game that features next to no narrative structure. Taken from your homeland of Greece, Carthage or Egypt against your will, you will fight across the Roman Empire, facing off against opponents in arenas in Greece, Africa and eventually Rome itself. Outside of this, you’re given little reason for doing what you’re doing, but in all honesty, any further attempt at telling a story would feel tacked on and unnecessary. All you need to worry about is the fighting. Killing your opponents and coming out the other side unscathed is all that matters, and the purity of experience that this offers is refreshing.
Perhaps the best comparison to the combat within Story of a Gladiator would be SEGA Genesis classics Streets of Rage or Golden Axe. Fighting takes place against a preset 2D background, and you move your character up and down and left and right to navigate arenas, with your fighter needing to be on the same plane as their opponent to land a successful attack. It can be a little frustrating to judge whether or not your weapon (or your opponent’s) will make a connection or not due to this setup, and there were a number of times whether I lost health due to a mistaken belief that I had moved out of range of an attack. For the most part, though, combat is relatively simple, with a limited set of basic and special moves creating an engine that is streamlined and easy to pick up.
Each location within the game contains fifteen different battles, with fourteen taking the form of a wave-based event, and the final battle seeing you face-off against a boss. As I wanted to see all that the game had to offer, and because I’m not particularly egotistical about my gaming prowess, I played through the game on Easy difficulty, and I have to say that even doing that I found some of the battles quite difficult. There is a levelling system for your character, where you can improve your skills by learning new moves and can purchase new weapons and armor to improve your stats, but I was surprised by how often and how early on in the game I would have to pause my progress and go back to earlier levels to gain enough skills or buffs to progress through a tougher battle. Once I got to the point where I could cheese my way through a couple of particularly lucrative battles and level up my equipment quickly, I found that the remainder of the game went smoothly, but to hit as many roadblocks as I did, even on the easiest setting, was more than I expected.
As you successfully finish fights (and even if you don’t), you’ll earn money and experience, both of which are used in the small town outside of the arena. This reminded me a little bit of Dragon’s Crown, where you would work your way through a small 2D town before setting off on a quest, levelling up skills, buying equipment and items and making sure that your party was ready to go. While Story of a Gladiator doesn’t have quite the same depth, it offers up similar reasoning for visiting these vendors. You can purchase weapons and armor, more of which unlock as you progress through the game, making for a steady stream of items to aim for. You can also visit a temple and pray for a god’s assistance during your next battle, purchase wild animals to fight alongside you, and even, in Monster Hunter fashion, buy a big meal to give you some stat boosts.
With your experience, you can visit a trainer who allows you to unlock new skills, some passive such as stun resistance or faster attack speed, and some active, like an evasive roll or a jump attack. These skills can be reassigned at any time, meaning that if you’re struggling with a particular type of enemy, you can change your setup around to better suit alternate tactics. There are fifteen character levels in total, allowing for fifteen skill points, and with each skill allowing a maximum of three upgrades, you can sometimes have to be quick picky about which skills you’re going to take into battle with you.
Each fight only takes a couple of minutes at most, meaning that if you do have to grind to progress, you can quite quickly rack up some valuable loot to buy some new equipment. It does also mean, though, that the gameplay experience s quite short, and there is little reason to return to previous battles, aside from earning more money. Players are awarded stars (from 1-3) depending on how much health you finish a fight with, and though there is a small use for these stars, it eventually gets to the point where the only reason to return and get a better rating on some fights would be for personal pride. All told, it probably took me 4-5 hours to see almost all of what Story of a Gladiator had to offer, though, as I mentioned earlier, this was on the easiest difficulty. As a caveat to this, though, I think that had I not played on the easiest difficulty I would have out the game down long before the end, as the difficulty level would have cause too much frustration to continue.
I enjoyed my time with Story of a Gladiator, as it offered up a relatively simple, fast-paced combat experience with enough incentive to continue that I felt obligated to stick it out to the end. The in-game economy is finely balanced to the point that there’s always another upgrade that requires just one or two more fights to obtain, with the outcome that this will allow you to progress that little bit further and again need another upgrade that’s just out of reach to get further once more. I don’t think that there’s enough here to keep players coming back again and again, and once you’ve made it through the listed fights there isn’t much point in continuing, but it’s certainly fun enough to pass away a few evenings. If you’ve been looking for a 2D fighter, or even something a little different, then Story of a Gladiator is worth looking at.
