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Gladiator: Sword of Vengeance

I have to wonder if it’s just a coincidence that Gladiator: Sword of Vengeance was released at about the same time as Lucasarts’ Gladius. While the two games play very differently, they obviously share a similar theme. However, a few minutes of playing the game should destroy any notions that Gladiator: Sword of Vengeance draws any influence from Lucasart’s title. On the contrary, Gladiator: Sword of Vengeance draws a great deal of influence from many other games and movies.

Playing through the first fifteen minutes of the game, one could be easily misled into thinking that this game is based on Ridley Scott’s Oscar-winning film Gladiator. Going farther than the simple similarities in the game’s theme, the title has you playing a heroic gladiator who openly defies an evil Emperor whose evil rule could bring Rome to ruins. Sound familliar? Furthermore, the lighting, the vocal soundtrack, and even the look of the feilds of Elysium are pretty spot-on, to the point where you actually expect to see Russel Crowe’s face when the gladiator pulls off his mask. In many ways, this game is a complete and blatant rip-off of Ridley Scott’s epic that’s so laughably shameless you have to wonder why the lawsuit hasn’t come yet.

However, if that’s the case, it’s a very good rip-off. Credit given where credit’s due, Gladiator: Sword of Vengeance has surprisingly high production values, especially for a multiplatform game. The version being reviewed, the Xbox version, looks like it was designed with the Xbox in mind, something somewhat uncommon for cross-platform games. Nomatter where you’d argue this game’s inspiration came from, you have to respect the great amount of care that went into bringing this inspiration into reality.

For starters, this game has hands-down the best-looking blood I’ve ever seen in a videogame. It splatters on the ground and on the characters themselves, shining in the sunlight or seeping into the ground. The game’s lighting and shadows are also very good, the character animations are wonderful, and the artistic direction (As ridiculously similar to Ridley Scott’s as it is) is top-notch.

The music and sound is very good as well. The game’s soundtrack, while certainly derivitive of the film, is wonderful. The voice acting is reasonably well-done. The sound effects are very nice as well, with everything from footsteps in the sand to the shattering of clay pots sounding just as it should.

So, after our fifteen minutes are up, and our hero valliantly faces the evil emperor, the emperor… kills him effortlessly? Wait a minute, that’s not how the movie went. Well, it kinda’ is, but what about the part where the emperor dies and what’s the deal with these freaky little kids and crap? After a little explanation, It appears that the emperor hasn’t been playing by the rules. You see, instead of dying and passing the rule of Rome to the senate, like in the movie, he made a deal with Phobos and Deimos, the Roman gods of fear and terror. Apparently, he never read the script.

It is at this point that the game starts to draw from other influences, as Invictus “Don’t call me Maximus” Thrax must battle his way back from the feilds of Elysium through hordes of mythical monsters with the ultimate goal of returning to Rome and dispensing some much-needed justice and revenge on Emperor “My name’s not Commodus” Arruntius. Now entering the realm of mythology, the game starts to seem more remeniscent of Tecmo’s Rygar for PS2.

With Thrax already down 0-1, it wouldn’t do much good to return to Rome without something to leverage the odds back in his favor. Luckily for him, he’ll collect a number of new weapons and abilities along the way, including battle magic that will give him the strength of Hercules, the might of Jupiter, and the power of Pluto (Sit, boy!). As Thrax fights, a power meter charges and when it has completely filled, he can unleash a magical ability which can, for example, temporarily give him an added strength and speed, or the assistance of undead Wraith Knights.

These new abilities are gained through challenges spread throughout the game’s levels, some which are simple (”defeat all enemies within a minute”) and some which are a little more tricky (”Destroy all pots in the room with magic attacks in a minute, all while an endless number of enemies attacks you”). To access many of the game’s challenges, you’ll either have to solve one of the game’s extremely simple (As in, “Put the key in the keyhole”) puzzles, or do battle with a ton of enemies.

This is what you’ll be doing most of the time. More than anything else, Thrax will be spending his time fighting hordes upon hordes of enemies, consisting largely of cackling skeletons (With shades of Sam Raimi’s Army of Darkness). In battle, you have two attacks that, in theory, you can alternate to create combos. In reality, the action quickly becomes an excersize in button-mashing. You can also roll to the side or jump towards and away from your opponent, something that will become more necessary in later battles that pit you against less brainless opponents.

More than this, one of the battle system’s bigger flaws is its targetting system. When enemies come into the area, the closest one becomes Thrax’s primary target. By pressing (And holding) L switches to a secondary target automatically selected by the game. In otherwords, if you’re surrounded by five enemies (which you often are), and one is nearly dead, it’s luck of the draw whether or not you’ll be able to target him. Furthermore, the primary and secondary targets are always changing, meaning if you attack and kill one enemy and quickly press L to switch to a second, then release it in an attempt to attack a third, you’ll just end up attacking the second enemy a second time, as he’s now become your primary target. This becomes very tiresome to put up with when you’re being attacked by a dozen enemies at once.

What’s even worse, when targetting an enemy, your movement is relative to them. Pressing R releases the lock, but engaging an enemy in combat again automatically turns the lock back on. This means that if you’re trying to quickly run to the other side of a room to reach a goal before a timer runs out, even so much as swiping at an enemy to get them out of your way will slow you down immensely, even if it’s a killing blow (You’ll just automatically lock-on to a second target).

All complaints aside, once you get used to the battle engine’s eccentricities, it can be fun to dart from enemy to enemy, attacking one after the other, even if you do it by button-mashing. The game rewards quick successive attacks with damage bonuses, so it generally pays to mix things up anyways, and the game even gives you the occasional opportunity to perform glorified “finishing moves” which are fun to watch but ultimately don’t do a whole lot that a regular attack wouldn’t do faster. After all’s said and done, even with the stuff that’s been tossed in to spice things up, it does get a bit tiresome to attack dozens of the same type of enemy requiring little skill other than “attack, attack, attack, dodge, attack again”.

On a final note, the game’s save system is also somewhat annoying. The game saves automatically at certain locations, and doesn’t save again until you reach the next area, which may be just around the corner or a long distance away (usually the latter), which can make for a great annoyance when you have to replay a twenty-minute section over and over again.

It’s unfortunate that the game’s flaws take a lot of the fun out of this title, because it had the potential to be truly great. As it stands, it’s still a fantastically well-produced game that generally does justice to the movies and games it “borrows” from. It’s just a fantastically well-produced game whose gameplay isn’t particularly deep or fulfilling.

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Tags: Gladiator: Sword of Vengeance

Posted by Jake McNeill on Jan 13th, 2004 and is filed under Reviews, Xbox Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can post a comment, or trackback from your own site.

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