As the popular quote goes, “In the Game of Thrones, you win, or you die.” The same can often be said about gladiatorial tournaments held thousands of years ago and, much more recently, about video games which have sought to give players an idea of what those tournaments might have been like. 2019’s Story of a Gladiator, developed and published by Brain Seal Ltd., is a game that I think puts forward a good effort to put you in the shoes (sandals?) of a warrior of old.

I especially like the fact that the game is easy for anyone to pick up and play while still being satisfying when you progress in the campaign. Story of a Gladiator has a fair few areas where it could stand to improve, though I think these shortcomings are far outweighed by everything the game does well.

When you start a new single-player campaign, you’re asked to choose whether your gladiator hails from Greece, Carthage, or Egypt. Whichever option you pick has a unique perk associated with it: Choosing Greece makes your character deal bonus damage, choosing Carthage gives your gladiator extra maximum health, and selecting Egypt grants you an extra skill point you can spend to improve your combat abilities when you level up.

These perks remain the same in terms of their effectiveness no matter which of Story of a Gladiator’s three difficulty settings you go with. You’re free to pick whichever bonus sounds most appealing to you regardless of how much of a challenge you want it to give you.

I would describe Story of a Gladiator as a 2D, arcade-style beat-‘em-up. Before you enter into any fight in its campaign, the game will tell you how many enemies you’ll be up against and into how many individual waves that number of enemies will be split.

Your goal is to slay all the enemies in a battle before they do the same to you and you’ll have a decent amount of freedom as to how you go about doing that. Unless you’re playing on the hardest difficulty setting, your gladiator will surrender any fights you lose rather than dying outright, though you’ll have to contend with a limited number of lives at maximum difficulty.

Story of a Gladiator’s campaign is arranged into individual gladiatorial games, which I prefer to think of as “levels” or “stages.” As you might expect, you can only advance to a new stage after you’ve completed the one before it at least once. What I find quite appealing about this is that you can freely go back and replay any stages you’ve previously finished as much as you like.

Replaying previous levels can be quite a useful strategy because each level will give you a set amount of gold and experience each time you emerge victorious, which means this tactic can be an efficient way to store up large amounts of both of these resources. The more gold and experience you have at your disposal, the more significant character upgrades you’ll be able to obtain. You’ll upgrade by purchasing upgraded weapons and armor and by spending skill points to unlock new combat skills each time you level up.

Farming plenty of gold and experience by replaying past levels can work to your advantage as you progress further in the campaign as well. Since your performance in each fight is rated on a scale from one to three stars, you can go back to any previous stages where you earned one star, especially once your gladiator is stronger. Since you’ll earn additional gold and experience from doing this, you can make future challenges easier by spending that extra income on even better upgrades, thus helping to make later stages in the campaign easier.

I can understand why some portions of Story of a Gladiator’s player base might not view the replayability factor of its campaign as well as I do. You may reach a point where you feel forced to choose between going back and replaying previous levels to become stronger or bashing your head against a wall by repeatedly attempting a stage of the campaign that’s giving you a difficult time. That has happened to me multiple times and I think players are justified in feeling that this mainly serves to pad out the length of the game’s campaign. It is also reasonable to say that this adds a sense of tedious grinding to it.

I’m not much of a completionist, but Story of a Gladiator still finds ways to entice me to do things like ensure I get the maximum performance rating on every level no matter how many attempts it takes. For example, I find the most satisfaction in going back to the campaign stages where I had the most defeats once my gladiator is quite a bit stronger than when I first attempted those challenges. Decimating those enemies that once gave me trouble is immensely satisfying.

Having said all that, though, there are a fair few things I dislike about Story of a Gladiator’s campaign and the combat challenges it sets out for you. I think my biggest gripe about the in-game combat is that it tends to feel quite one-sided much of the time. Unless an enemy blocks the first strike you send their way or perhaps uses a special ability to interrupt you after you’ve started attacking, you can stun-lock multiple grouped enemies at a time simply by mashing your basic attack so much that your foes don’t have time to react. This feels both unfair and tedious to me.

What’s worse, that same thing can just as easily happen to you. If you wind up surrounded by enemies who all have different attack patterns and you can’t easily create some distance to allow yourself to fight back or reposition, you can go from full health to being defeated in a matter of seconds. You have a couple of defensive abilities by default, mainly blocking with your shield and running for a brief time. However, you’ll need to gain several levels and spend some skill points if you want to defend yourself more effectively.

Speaking of skill points and unlockable abilities, these also have parts to them that I feel differently about. Something I like is that you can freely refund any skill points you’ve previously spent and use them elsewhere to change up your abilities and strategies to better suit any campaign levels that give you trouble. At least this way you can be sure you haven’t somehow unknowingly doomed yourself to failure at any point in the campaign by spending your skill points sub-optimally, which I find is a nice feeling.

What I find disappointing here, though, is that I think many of the special abilities you can unlock and upgrade by spending skill points on them could stand to be balanced more. For example, I’ve made such frequent use of the dodge-roll ability in particular that I think it might as well be considered mandatory. At the same time, I haven’t really seen much of a compelling reason to invest any skill points at all into other abilities and upgrades.

Then there’s the Kick ability, which knocks enemies to the ground and stuns them for a few seconds. I’ve used this ability quite a lot as well, but I can’t necessarily say I’m proud of that. It’s another combat mechanic that strikes me as cheap and unfair, especially since you can damage kicked enemies while they’re on the ground in addition to them being briefly stunned once they get back on their feet. Even so, I admit that desperate times do indeed call for desperate measures. After all, sometimes fighting a bit dirty is the only way to ensure you live to fight another day.

However, at least the special abilities I do prefer to unlock and use add some variety to each fight in the campaign. That brings me to another area where Story of a Gladiator falls short. No matter which of the unlockable types of upgraded weapons you’re using, there doesn’t seem to be any diversity in your offense aside from those special abilities you can unlock. As far as I can tell, there are no different animations or unique attacks for any weapon type, no different attacks if you press a direction button while attacking, nor anything else like that.

I’m not asking for Story of a Gladiator to include a deeply fleshed-out move list as you’d find in a fully-fledged fighting title, but I would still like to see a larger assortment of strikes than just mashing the basic attack button and hoping for the best. Much of the time while seeing the exact same handful of weapon-swinging animations. Yes, purchasing stronger weapons lets you inflict more damage with each successful hit, but that’s about as far as that effect goes. That strikes me as disappointing because I think there is quite a lot of untapped potential here.

As I said earlier, I consider Story of a Gladiator to be a respectable effort on the part of Brain Seal. Story of a Gladiator is one of only four games the studio have released on Steam as far as I can tell, alongside three entries in their Dark Quest series. I believe the developers at Brain Seal have a commendable future ahead of them provided that they devise some effective methods of building upon the foundation they’ve set with this venture.

A PC review key for Story of a Gladiator was provided by Brain Seal Ltd. for this review.

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Story of a Gladiator

$10.99

7

Score

7.0/10

Pros

• Simple gameplay loop is easy to pick up and play
• Overcoming challenging campaign levels always feels satisfying
• Easily refunding skill points makes decisions pleasantly less consequential
• High replayability

Cons

• Combat can feel tedious, unfair, and one-sided
• Special skills and abilities could be balanced more effectively
• Very little in-combat variety outside of limited special abilities
• Replaying previous levels can sometimes feel mandatory