Overview: Gladiatus is a timer-based RPG where you play a battle-hardened gladiator in ancient Rome. The gameplay is very simple and text-based – select actions when they become available and collect the rewards. It’s made by a German developer, so the text definitely has the flavor of fair-to-middling translation, which can lead to some confusing quest text, but it’s not too disruptive. There is no tutorial, though, and triggering a timer can be a cause of major frustration when you realize you’ve blindly made the wrong choice, so we’ll try to point you in the right direction to give it a fair shot.

Once you’ve got your character created and verified your email, you’re plopped down on your profile page with no further direction. The first thing to do is equip that shield sitting in your inventory – it does you no good until you put it on! Then look down the navigation and drop by the Tavern. The chatty publican is your source for quests. Hopefully you’ll be offered a quest to go chat with another shopkeeper. If you can’t tell who he’s sending you to, just click all the links until one of them gives you the quest completion text. You’ll get a small reward of gold and experience, and occasionally an item.

You can spend your gold on items, but it’s probably worth going to the trainer first. Each successive point in each stat goes up in price, so you have to make some choices about how you want to spend your money. However, there’s no actual explanation of what each stat does on the Trainer screen. You have to go to the Overview and mouse over not the stats but your Life Points, Armour, and Damage lines to see the breakdown of what effects each stat has. Charisma and Intelligence appear nowhere, because they don’t come into play until you begin adventuring in Dungeons, which are not available until level 10.

Once you’ve trained up a bit and hopefully done one of the gossip quests, you’ll get a quest that sends you to collect some particle of a bad guy, or possibly just a number of them you’re supposed to slaughter. If you click over on the other tab on the left navigation bar (the one that looks like a map) you’ll get to the map where all of your adventures take place. Clicking on the map or the navigation will allow you to spend your “Expedition points” and go on an adventure. You’ll get the results instantly, and any items will be mailed to you, but you can only go on an expedition at most every ten minutes (if you choose the shortest option.)

The other half of the game, that you can participate in starting at level 2, is arena combat. There are three kinds of arena combat – a simple ladder-based one-to-one matchup at level 2, Circus Omnipotens, a win streak rating (all you have to do is win multiple successive victories in the arena), and at level 10, Circus Turma, a group fight where you hire and equip mercenaries to join you. You can work your way up through the masses of abandoned level 2 characters pretty quickly, but the highest ranks are quite competitive.

The mercenaries used in the “Circus Turma” are also used in dungeon crawling. You purchase mercs like regular items, but then you can load them up with gear just like your regular character. This is where the Charisma and Intelligence stats come into play – they affect healing, which you can either direct a merc to do or handle yourself. (It’s all handled automatically via random roll, so it’s just a matter of choosing the character with the best stats.) When the dungeons open up at level 10, you’ll need a full crew of well-equipped mercs to get through the multi-stage adventures in the Dungeons.

Speaking of equipping, there are a couple of ways to do that. You can buy items from the game’s shopkeepers, you can buy them from other players in the Market, and you can participate in the Auction House. It’s worth checking around all three areas to get the best bargains, although be wary of the auction house – if you bid on an item and someone outbids you, you lose the entire amount you bid.

The best items, of course, are available for the real-money currency, “Rubies.” You can also spend rubies on various temporary improvements to your character or become a Centurion, which reduces many of the game’s timers so you can fight in the area or go on adventures more often. The temporary buffs have a two-week duration and the exchange rate works out to be something like $5 a month, which is pretty typical for optional subscriptions for this kind of game.

There’s also a cute little method to invite your friends. They give you a link for your friends to click – here, try mine.

Heh. Each “mugging” gives the player some gold and honor, which is a decent reward. Having friends around is also helpful if you want to defend yourself from random arena attacks – there are some rules in place to prevent “bashing”, but it’s nice to have a bunch of thugs to go persuade someone to leave you in peace. If you form or join a guild, you can also pool your resources to build up your guild’s hall and get some very nice bonuses. Guilds can also declare war on one another, for added fun.

Overall, Gladiatus is a good game for the detail-oriented and competitive. Working out the best training, equipment, and mercenaries for your character to beat dungeons or succeed in the arena is definitely an interesting challenge, and there is a lively playerbase on the forums helping each other do just that. The active and warring guilds also might suit the politically-minded player, as negotiations and challenges are always flying. The casual player, however, will likely find Gladiatus too slow-paced and impenetrable, and go for a game better suited to their playstyle.