Because I generally enjoy turn based tactical combat games and an ancient times inspired fantasy setting isn't something you see every day, I was intrigued by this game. I saw some gameplay of the early game online and even though it looked fairly basic, I was curious enough to give it a try.

The game has you fight in tournaments (called challenges) with a selection of gladiators with various abilities depending on their class. There are 3 variations of melee, ranged and magic classes, each with their own class-specific abilities. Depending on the stats of your gladiators, you have a number of move and action points which you can use each turn. Killing all enemies in a round advances you to the next fight in the tournament. If you win the last round, you get some money and equipment as a reward. Your gladiators gain experience and unlock stat increase rolls each time they level up, so after a while you can customize your team to your liking. Basic stuff.

What makes it a bit more involving is that between tournaments, you get to visit your village where you can purchase buildings and manage your gladiators. The buildings unlock new features such as a place to recruit new gladiators, a place to train them and learn new abilities, to purchase equipment and to heal wounded fighters. As you progress to later 'ages' (new arenas), the town offers even more options like the ability to get additional stat bonuses based on faith/gods and honoring the dead and sending your benched gladiators on expeditions. While these side activities are very simple fire and forget actions and don't offer any real new gameplay, they do offer some appeal as extra carrots on a stick to chase after optimal efficiency and making your team ever more powerful. There's also tasks/quests that grant some loot rewards for taking specific actions in the town or during tournaments, which does encourage you to change things up and use different gladiators with different abilities in the arena as opposed to just sticking with the same winning formula the entire time.

The foundations for a decent gameplay loop with just enough bells and whistles are there, and the game doesn't fall into the trap of unnecessarily overcomplicating things, but it has one major flaw in its design that means I can't really recommend it.

You're taking on 'challenges', but the game never offers a real challenge.

There's never any pressure to advance and you can grind your way through repetition of the easiest arena with the easiest opponents indefinitely. There is no looming threat you have to stay ahead of that urges you along, as is present in many games like this. After a short while everything becomes trivial. You never have to worry about losing your favorite gladiators because you can just avoid putting them in any real danger. While it costs in game currency to do so, you can keep rerolling stat bonuses on gladiator levelups until you get the most powerful options (and the differences are very substantial, additional action points in particular). You can do so indefinitely because nothing stops you from farming trivial content for income. The town feature where you 'honor the dead' becomes about intentionally throwing worthless fresh recruits at max level which you don't have to invest in to the lions to get even bigger stat bonuses. You never send the gladiators you actually want to use on expeditions where they could die. Because why would you, when you can just send them on 3 easier expeditions instead and get the same stat bonuses? All it takes is a bit more time and a bit more grinding.

On top of that, there are balance issues. Some abilities are clearly always good, but most are highly situational. They may require you to line up your opponents in very specific ways that will almost never happen, some have a random chance to apply or remove status effects but because you can't rely on them to work you can't really build a strategy around those, there are abilties that are very awkward to use around friendly targets and others still just cost too many action points for their effect. The enemies you face are randomly pulled from a pool that's associated with the arena you are currently in and you can't switch to different abilities between rounds, so even if you wanted to you can't prepare specific abilities to address specific strengths and weaknesses of the enemies you're up against. You'll soon find yourself just sticking with generally useful abilities to move around the arena and kill your enemies as quickly as possible without too much setup. Ideally you mop up the majority of your enemies before the opponent even gets to take a turn.

The story and setting aren't explored much either. There's a few characters that'll say a couple of lines every time you complete a 'challenge' for the first time, but there's not a whole lot to it. You know everything you need to know from a bit of exposition at the very start of the game and there are no real twists, character or story developments that change anything throughout your playthrough. The emperor killed your father, you want to earn enough credit to compete in his arena so you can reach the emperor and kill him to get your revenge. At the very end of the game you uncover the emperor is under influence of a malign force so it's not entirely his fault that he's a douche, there's a mcguffin that is rumored to magically cure him but as it turns out it doesn't actually work and you become the douche. That's about it.

I stuck with the game and completed one run, but I don't think I'll ever revisit it. I got some enjoyment out of it, but in hindsight I feel like it wasn't really worth my time. Although a significant portion of my logged game time was spent AFK in the town while I was doing other things around the house, so it's not as bad as it looks and I could probably have easily completed the game if I'd stopped grinding quite a bit sooner. I'd recommend giving this one a pass, and looking at games like XCOM or Xenonauts instead for an experience that feels more rewarding.

No saves during battles or between rounds is a deal-breaker

It's XCOM with gladiators... on crack...