Gladiator Begins – Review – PSP

Admit it; you’ve always wondered what it would be like to be a Gladiator. From being a slave to being one of the most notorious fighters in Rome, relive history and create your own personalized fighter in Gladiator Begins.

Story: “Marcus Aurelius Antoninus was the last of the “Five Good Emperors”. He was gifted with a brilliant mind, and his influence brought peace, both at home and abroad. However, as Marcus entered his final years, the question of succession was raised, and tempers flared. A secret feud flared up between the aristocrats and soldiers who supported Commodus, Marcus’s son, and those who supported General Cassius. The feud grew more desperate, and less secret, day by day. As Rome’s days of peace began to draw to a close, a new gladiator arrived at the Colosseum…”

Gameplay: A PSP sequel to the Japanese PS2 title Colosseum: Road to Freedom, Gladiator Begins involves you playing the role of a slave – a slave who is destined to do great things that will create the course of history. A slave who becomes one of the most recognized and notorious gladiators in all of Rome. At first I thought this was just a straight up simple arena fighting game, but very quickly I realized this game is actually so much more. The thing that really surprised me is how much depth and control you actually have in this game. From choosing a roman name to choosing your overall appearance and gender, you create a gladiator as you see fit. After some basic training, you are taken to events around Rome to fight. These events are put on by the rich, political Romans for entertainment or even run by retired gladiators who like to see a good fight. Gladiator Begins is played in days. Each day you attend an event and participate in a certain amount of shows. Depending on your rank, the amount of shows you participate in during each event and the type of people you fight changes. Shows might consist of you against an infinite amount of enemies within 60 seconds or free for all, or even shows that allow you to fight as a team. There are even shows that will allow one-on-one fights putting you against the best picked gladiator in your rank. As nice as it is to have a second person fighting alongside you, the team matches can be quite frustrating. I mean, it’s nice that they fight one opponent allowing you to focus on another but when it comes down to the last opponent and you are both attacking him or her, they just get in the way. What I mean is that the game has a sense of realism in that, if you attack and someone is in the way of your swing, they will get hit. After each show, your performance is graded and money is awarded along with ability points to improve your character. Once you have completed all the available shows, you return to your stable, totals are calculated which show how much money you have collected from the event, your overall rank and how much debt you still have. Arriving at the stable marks the end of a day and the start of a new one. Starting the new day means another event with more shows. Pretty soon you start to get noticed by those who run the events and finally the game starts to follow a story. It takes a while before you get to this point, but once you do, you won’t want to put the game down. There are many people you talk to, but up to 4 different patrons you speak to which will change how you play the game. I think depending on who you decide to favour, the story changes but ultimately it follows the one main storyline mentioned in the story part of this review. I didn’t have the time to replay and figure this out, but if true, this allows for a lot of replay ability; repetitive fighting, but there are 4 different experiences.

Now onto the fighting and RPG like component of the game; the way you fight is actually pretty cool. Using the face buttons on the PSP, you control where you want to attack your opponent. So instead of just mashing the square and triangle button to attack your opponent with light or heavy attacks like in any other action RPG, you control where to attack your opponent. Square is used to attack your opponent’s right side, circle to attack their left, triangle to attack their head and x to attack their legs or feet. So what does this allow you to do? Well all gladiators wear some type of armor and carry some sort of weapon so by choosing where to attack your opponent, you can focus all your energy on that one thing to remove it so you can actually start doing damage to them. Hesitate to attack though and your opponent will run to the object and pick it back up. Completing a show will allow you to choose a certain amount of dropped items which may be better than what you currently have. Otherwise visiting the armorer at each event will allow you to buy and sell better armor and weapons. Along with your attacks, you can also assign skills to create a more powerful attack which really helps in removing the item from your opponent quickly. However with power come consequences. Attacking reduces your stamina and with these skills added, stamina is reduced quicker making you weak and more vulnerable to attacks more quickly. As well, you can choose various fighting styles and only certain skills will work with each fighting style. It would have been nice if the skills were separated by style so it was easier to choose, but sadly it is not. The various fighting styles to choose from all depend on what weapons or armor you equip. If you have two swords, that’s one style. If you have a sword and a shield, that’s another style. Maybe you are a close combat fighter and just want to punch but wear a lot of armor. The ability points you collect after each match are used to increase your strength which allows you to hold and wear heavier objects, while you can also increase your defense and vitality to improve how much pain you can withstand and how much health you have. The choice is always up to you.

Graphics/Presentation: Being a sequel to a PS2 game, Gladiator Begins does a great job of retaining the look and feel of its predecessor. Actually, I think it even looks better than the PS2 version. The characters, weapons, armor, and animations are all well done and fluent. Blood that is splattered on you during the fight stays there and is sometimes shown during the calculation screen at the end of a show or at the start of the game, it is shown during training when you are put back in line. If you did a great job during the fight, your character cheers with the crowd. If you did a poor job, he’ll stumble and looked wounded. The presentation and overall menu structure is also clean and easy to move around. Some things could have been grouped together to allow easier navigation and selection or less roman words would have helped, but it did a great job of making you feel like a slave or gladiator in that time period.

Multiplayer: For those that like a little multiplayer in their games, Gladiator Begins does have a battle arena. What this allows you to do is put your gladiator up against a friend’s gladiator to see who will win. Just like the campaign, you fight in the arena. Also, if trading is your thing, players can swap gladiators between PSP’s. I didn’t have a chance to try any of this out, but to my knowledge it is only over a local network so no online matchmaking or anything like that as far as I know.

Overall: I came into this game expecting a simple action RPG but ended up getting slapped in the face with a game that’s surprising as it has a lot of depth. You have a lot of customization options, great progression, interesting fighting mechanics, and great visuals. Although the shows are very repetitive and don’t offer anything new, they do pose quite a challenge and with the rights skills you get some pretty satisfying attacks; especially the one where you attack, jump in the air and attack downwards on your opponent from the side or back causing them to stumble. For those unsure of what this game is about and you decide you need to try it, I recommend downloading the demo for the game. I have a feeling you’ll want to upgrade to the full version.

Pros:
-Interesting fighting mechanics
-Great visuals
-Portrays the Roman Empire quite well
-A captivating story that will keep you playing for hours
-Possibility of multiple story choices for replay ability

Cons:
-Too many Roman words
-Occasionally cheap AI that constantly attacks
-Hard to block quickly sometimes
-Minor navigational issues

Overall score: 8.5/10

A Copy of this game was provided to the reviewer for reviewing purposes from the publisher

Popularity: 8% [?]