In Gladiator Heroes you take control of an increasingly-expanding empire with the help of a small army of gladiatorial warriors. You begin with just one weak warrior and two buildings in your home town. Expand the map, though, and you’ll see that the world you can conquer is vast compared with where you start. Taking to the colosseum, your gladiator battles it out automatically, and all you’re required to do is initially place him and choose his special moves. When the battle is won you receive gold coins, wooden planks, and red gems, all of which can be spent on building your empire. The wood allows you to build new areas in your city, including an armoury, infirmary, and training ground, whereas the gold coins can be spent on improving your gladiator’s strength and fitness. Red gems allow every process to be sped up.
The further you expand the better your rewards are, meaning you can not only increase the productiveness and efficacy of each building you own, but also recruit more warriors into battle. Gradually, new terrains will be met, which require new and better resources within your city: for example, a caravan is needed in order to progress from the first area into the second. It then becomes more difficult to balance your earnings as opponents become tougher, and a defeat down the line could result in your gladiator being sent to the infirmary for several hours. The threat doesn’t just come within the game’s characters itself either, but also from other, actual people playing the game: online multiplayer is a key feature. Of course, if you want to get ahead of the opposition that badly, there are always in-app purchases that can be made.[sc name=”quote” text=”It then becomes more difficult to balance your earnings as opponents become tougher, and a defeat down the line could result in your gladiator being sent to the infirmary for several hours.”]
It’s difficult to put Gladiator Heroes in a particular category. It’s marketed as a strategy game, but within the battles themselves there’s no strategy involved; instead, the game’s AI is left to do the working-out for you. With the number of resources you need to collect to build your empire and improve your gladiators, an argument could be made that it’s role-playing, but again it’s cloudy. Being able to decide how you invest in buildings and cities and where you place them is reminiscent of simulation games. While a mixture of two or three genres can never be a criticism – many games just do that – with Gladiator Heroes there’s a real sense that it doesn’t know its place; that it doesn’t succeed at being any. If it is a strategy game then the majority of the method in battle is taken out of your hands completely, for a role-playing game there’s little to no freedom, and, well, it definitely can’t pass a simulation game.[sc name=”quote” text=”It’s difficult to put Gladiator Heroes in a particular category.”]
The result of this confusion is that there are far many things going on in Gladiator Heroes. You’re in charge of managing every gladiator, their training, health, armoury, and how they level up. It doesn’t sound too difficult, but in order to do this you need to ensure you build the correct buildings, level them up in the right order, and also wait until they’ve been built and the gladiator has finished being refreshed in them. Things are even harder to juggle when you have to battle the main missions and side missions to be rewarded with any of the resources to do anything in the first place. The fact that red gems, two different shapes of gold coin, silver coins, and bronze coins all make up the in-game currencies speaks volumes.
In its mechanics Gladiator Heroes isn’t bad: it runs smoothly and looks nice. The map is fairly small, making it easy to navigate around. Yet perhaps this is the issue: cramming too much in to such a small space. Perhaps if it focused on one particular area its gameplay it could do its design justice, but instead it’s too muddled, and it’s hard to get into a game that you can’t get your head around.
