GLADIATOR! GLADIATOR GLADIATORRRRRR!!!!!

the voice actor for sagan blob needs a raise

Ahhh, finally! I've been waiting for the release of this game for a long time.
I loved S&S all the way back in the flash days.
I was addicted to S&S2, and then 3, and then tavern quest. And then there was a dungeon crawler that I loved.
And then... my heart broke when it went offline.
Years later I decided to buy the "franchise 5" bundle, and got wind of remakes of my two favorites, and I was once again hooked. And soon after I became a Patreon, supporting this wonderful creator since.

And now there is a game that has ALL the best of not just these two games, but some of the others too! S&S 2 meets 5 with multiplayer (soon)!?
Oliver, you truly outdid yourself... the ultimate fan compilation, in a way.
So now I have all the past games of old, including the ones that are remade, a few strategy games, a platformer, and now this...

It looks better than ever, it plays smoother than ever before, it has more story and lore, and so, so much to do, even before he gets to add all the rest!
And you get to kick some serious ass, or decapitate people... cut of limbs.... what's not to like?
This will be a favorite of mine for a long time to come for sure!

Play it! Just your fellow champions today!

The dev is very responsive and open-minded.
Very supportive community. Join the discord

We are finally home boys.

Swords And Sandals Immortals picks up where S&S 3 leaves off.
In S&S3 your character defeats Ultratus Omega and then you get lifted in to sky and appear in a spaceship.
In year 640CM Automatons and Robotic Invade our world once again and in just 300 days the StarBound Gladiator will return to Tritonia to destruct the world.
Be the next Grand Champion and save the world!

From Oliver Joice, you could only expect a game for the fans so just enjoy the game and the fantastic new journey that awaits you Gladiator.

The prime activity as a Gladiator will be - you guessed it – to defeat other Gladiators from one place to the other in the different arenas around the world map of Brandor If that sounds boring, you couldn’t be more wrong.
Create your Gladiator and then show who is the boss.
Not only that but you will get a chance to defeat the Regional Champions of each arena and the Grand Champions.
You will progressively unlock, skills and encounter other fellow friends that will help you get stronger as the dangers and hindrances become consequently more complex.
Choose your skill points and stats points wisely and manage your gold.
Buy weapons and armors in the shops with a random chance to appear gear like in Diablo or S&S 3 with different stats and buff bonuses that will benefit your gladiator.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2823992331

You start as a weak gladiator but you gradually grow more powerfull!
The combat is refreshing and yet plays simple like the other games in the S&S franchise.
Definitely requires more tactical thinking than the previous S&S games with the stress meter mechanic and climate effects and traits for specific races.
Different from the other games, this installement when you loose a fight the only penalty for it is a day wasted and some gold lost, which it’s not bad but can make a difference in the future.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2863245686

Not available at the moment.

Tl;Dr: It's a good game if you like Swords and Sandals, but be aware that there is a lot of tweaks needed before the experience is really accessible and balanced.

Review:

The game is good, and it's a very good revival of the Swords & Sandals of old in which we spent a good deal of time testing out silly characters and builds so many years ago.

Is it perfect? No.

Right now I'd only really recommend it if you played the older games and have some nostalgia for it. The developers clearly put a lot of love into this, but there is a lot of fine-tuning to get to before the game is where it seems they want it to be (And this is mostly why I wanted to write this review, to give them good feedback and point out some things that could use an extra look at).

At the current time, the game seems absurdly hard with Perma-Death on (I know, big surprise, right?) but, even in normal mode, a lot of fights seem like a coin flip, especially at the beginning of the game where you have very little agency over your build.

As for builds, I just couldn't get a mage or bard to be anywhere near as viable as physically oriented characters, mostly because spells have an atrocious hit-rate in comparison to standard attacks and their after-effect DOTs deal 1~2 damage leaving much to be desired from an alternate playstyle standpoint.

To make matters worse, the third arena of the game prohibits skill usage, so making a spell-caster or non-physical character is very heavily punished early on, since you need a lot more resources (Stars, Int or Cha for damage, Attack for hit chance, and Essence to be able to keep up with spell costs, not to mention that the spell caster talents don't increase hit rate like the weapon talents do).

Spells are also a bit unclear in what they do, and a bit more transparency would be fantastic when deciding what to buy (For example, what stats they scale with being in their description so that you can actually build around things without having to experiment and find out yourself, potentially wasting resources.)

Int, for example, could scale the elemental damage done by elemental runes on weapons and the same for sonic runes and Cha. Bosses really wall you with very high defense builds back to back so even if you pump attack almost exclusively you'll find yourself having 20~30% chance to hit a lot of them with anything above a quick attack, which again pigeon-holes you into building just one type of character if you want to be anywhere near efficient.

A lot of races could use a bit more visual customization in their colors, which is a feature that already is in the game, but you have to make it a little bit further in before you can actually play around with the colors, which is kind of a bummer if you want to roleplay something from the get go.

Overall, do I like the game? Yes. I ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ love that this game exists. I've been waiting for a proper spiritual Swords and Sandals successor to come out for years now, to the point where I actually started developing one a year ago just to try my hand at it, because I think this formula has a lot of potential and it's really fun to play around with, and I'm very very happy to see the devs picking this back up.

There is a lot of work ahead, but there is also a lot of good stuff here, and they seem to know that and care for the project.

I've purchased a copy for myself and one for my girlfriend as a form of supporting the developers.

I really wish them the best moving forward with this project, and I really hope this grows to be a game worthy of the Swords and Sandals legacy.

Excuse me the language. I'm just frustrated, and I don't feel like I can elaborate on this differently to emphasize this game's issues. I also expanded on this review after sinking in dozens more hours at the weekend.

There aren't enough ways to improve accuracy (attack and vitality) in comparison to defences (defense chance to miss). 1% hit chance enemies (the second boss, for example, It's absurd. There should be a BARE MINIMUM HIT CHANCE of at least like 33%. Not dropping low to 1% ridicolousness like this. 140 Defense SaS2 enemies flashbacks, but at least in there options to mitigate that were available, here it doesn't matter, special skill or spell.) But again, 1% hit chance. Is this serious?!

Killing a boss should always result in a level up. PERIOD.

Even when their stats aren't invested in strength, enemies hit like trucks, and they only have one weapon, which isn't even enchanted. For real?

Too many layers of defense: If an attack doesn't fail (again, accuracy is hard to come by), then the enemies either parry, dodge, or block it, which makes the whole hit chance system unintuitive and even worse than it already is.

It takes a miracle to activate the battle trance effect. It stays at 99/100 for the player character on purpose from the developer and refuses to activate even after the enemy has been hit three times in a row (I literally feel like the game is cheating on me and not letting me enter it). On the other hand, enemies can obtain it easily after merely four hits, which leads to the belief that we're not equal only in terms of what's visible (stats), but also in terms of what's experienced during gameplay itself.

Not to mention all the enemies who always end up miraculously surviving with a range of 1 to 10 points of armor left instead of having it done with, as opposed to easily devastating your entire worth of it. This connects to the point above.

Also, again: I miss the old SaS, where armor actually did matter as a stat and couldn't be bypassed left and right, but perhaps once a year.

Losing equipment with 0 armor also removes the bonuses that the equipment was providing. This is critical, because stripping your character of items during a fight basically strips you of your character's defining stats and skills.

The third boss prevents your character from doing anything for three turns. Real? 3 turns? That's way too much early game. I'd suggest 1 turn; 2 is already crazy; but 3 is beyond ridiculous.

Co-op boss fights are BS. The enemy boss' ally is stronger than the boss himself. Example: I trashed Mcowicz with my main character, and then the boss' ally basically soloed both my main character and my ally, because he's been hitting for 200+, was parry-spamming when hit with a 66% hit chance normal attack (again, too many defensive layers, as I said), and was healing himself on top. Perfect example, demonstrating that even if you properly build your character, one capable of trashing a x2.5 boss, along comes some random dude who can't even get hit once on a freaking 66% hit chance due to parry spam, hits x3 the total damage that the boss would do, and heals himself three times as much. lol

Anyway, I miss the times when healing options weren't given away for free but were actually luxurious. In this game, I can't even tell how tanky an enemy is in reality if he has a backup of 50 potions. Even if there is one, that should not be the case. For real, healing should be something luxurious, and 90% of enemies the player meets should not even have it, so that the enemy's strength can be evaluated as much as possible simply by looking at the enemy's health, armor, and your hit chance against him. That did in fact work on SaS1, SaS2, and SaS3, and was fantastic. Currently, practically every enemy is a gamble, which is why the game feels dogsh*t.

The inability to enchant items with stats significantly reduces itemization when compared to old-school SaS3. It's either enchanted weapons or weapons with base attributes or skill tree skills. Having to choose between one or the other without the ability to combine is, in my opinion, tedious.
EDIT: I discovered that by enchanting epic and legendary weapons with runes, I could turn them into rare rarities. Unfortunately, it was probably unintentional. If it were me, I'd leave it that way and also let the player enchant uncommon as well as rare items too, and fix the rarity reduction bug.

Skills don't go past the 5/5 limit, so items that give you +2 to something that you already have basically yield you nothing, unlike old-school SaS3. This is critical. On top of that, there isn't even a way to make use of this because enemies strip you naked during fights, including said skills. Let alone the price of respec. Truly horrible: Respeccing in this game is way too expensive. Given how full of BS this game is, it should be free.

Dual-wielding mastery can be rolled with two-handed weapons and vice versa. Bows can roll swords mastery, guitars can roll maces mastery etc. which makes no sense.

Holy items show up in shops when your character is Evil and vice-versa. What's the point of this? To waste the player's time and to disappoint them? If I'm evil please make the vendors only sell evil items for me. I don't want to see a legendary-rarity tier item that I can't even buy because it has a different morality than mine. It's CRINGE. I hate this.

As much as I love SaS, it keeps getting more frustrating to try out the new games over the years. I miss the times when it was simple, like, there were no 7 difficulty levels, for example, and the game was perfectly fun as it goes, like Swords and Sandals 2 that is. Today I'm concerned with how to make the game as enjoyable as possible, and I don't really want to waste 10 hours per each difficulty setting just to find the perfect one between not being way too easy and not being too copium.

Also, the 300-days system is a joke. The old-school tournament system was much better, as the player could at least evaluate the current tournament boss difficulty range based on the level of the tournament. Right now I have no idea to begin with. Am I going to fight a level 50, 75, 85, or 100 final boss or what? There are no hints as to how prepared you should be. I wish there was something in the game that would tell you how strong is your character at the given moment compared to the final threat that will be thrown at you.

That all being said, the games used to be more easily intuitive back in the day. Nowadays, I have no idea what my character's accuracy strength is if there are three more defensive RNG rolls (parry, dodge, block) behind a successful hit. You think it's 66%, but it feels more like 15%. Worrying about this one aspect alone makes me not want to even engage with other character stats, not even to try a mage or an archer, which I always wanted to, especially the latter. I miss the days when the Attack stat was something you simply had to have, like 60% of your character's worth, but it wasn't a 90% investment that didn't pay off.

I'm tired of rolling this rigged dice to:
- make my character fall into a pit every time I'm asked to roll it because it's WEIGHTED AF,
- Because it is WEIGHTED again, start fights as second 95% of the time.
- lose two stats from my hard-earned levels as if they were nothing on every single ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ event, because it's WEIGHTED AF once more.
Can we please get a legitimate coin flip in this game instead of these dumb d10 and d20 dices? Just 50% vs 50%? Is this too much to ask for?

The 10 turn limit to kill unintuitive enemies that parry spam, block spam, and have access to dozens of freaking healing options (potions and skills) is absolute BS. Bosses included. Alt F4 Fiesta: "Pinnacle Gameplay" Not to mention, yet again, all the stupid parry spam and dodge spam. I even made a YouTube video that demonstrates how much a supposedly "three turns end" fight actually ends up being prolonged: https://youtu.be/Hyo0yuQ-g6w

If you are fan of Sword And Sandals, you are gonna be surprised how good this is.

If you are new to the game, this game is RNG based at its core, dont feel bad savescumming and also dont play time limted (default) mod.

This is a much hardcore experience (in terms of bosses) compared to previous instalments but it's still manageable with build of your liking, its will just take some time to farm and over level a bit, and ofc strategies the fight.

NPC levels can be very deceptive, you need to look out for their power level number instead, that is shown before you chalenge them (mostly bosses)

Right now, the last 2 bosses are insanle hard for normal difficulty and require specific build to overcome. They are completly on another level comaperd to other bosses, and hopefully will be tuned down for normal difficulty.


Overall, this is pretty solid experience for early access! A must buy for sure!

Huge Charles.