Gladiators Arena [Review]
Gladiator’s Arena lacks depth and variety.
Gladiator’s Arena is a bare-bones top-down arena shooter that lacks variety and replay value. You are a lone gladiator in a visually lifeless arena, fighting off wild animals, other gladiators, and monsters. The game is poorly balanced, lacks worthwhile progression, and gets boring quickly.
You start by picking a weapon, which you’ll wield for the entire run. There are seven in total that you can unlock, but most aren’t significantly different except for the bow and arrow and crossbow, which can break the game because of how effective they are. Keeping the same weapon the entire run is uninteresting.
Each wave throws a number of enemies at you that stream in from the north, west, south, and east gates of the arena. Kill them all, and you’ll have the opportunity to buy stat boosts and special abilities. I found the specials to be a waste because they trigger too seldomly or feel ineffective.
I earned all the game’s achievements within around an hour and a half. Once you upgrade enough of your stats during a playthrough, you become effectively invincible as the game’s difficulty doesn’t increase to compensate. It got to a point where I just stood still and effortlessly kept surviving dozens of waves, even when not using the overpowered ranged weapons. Once you unlock all the available (and effectively useless) special abilities by spending enough money, there’s nothing more to do.
While as it stands the game is severely lacking, it does have potential for improvement if the developers were to take a second design pass and add some features. However, the Steam version hasn’t been updated since July so I wouldn’t hold my breath.
Gladiator’s Arena is available on PC (Steam) and PlayStation 4/5.
Overall Score: 2/10
Played on: PS5
