Gladiator: Sword of Vengeance

"Great story with amazing graphics and good gameplay."

The story takes place in Rome 106 A.D. It focuses on the life of Thrax a Roman slave, he grew up with a dream to win the champion ship of all gladiators. One day the Roman emperor promised Thrax to give him his freedom, but suddenly with no reasons the emperor was murdered and replaced by a very bad man called Arruntius. Arruntius like I said a very madman, he decided to destroy Rome and replace it with a new city called Arruntium.

Thrax is dying, however before he dies, the Roman gods sent him two messengers, which happened to be the children of the Roman god Jupiter: Romulus and Remus. They told him that the Gods are very angry and displeased with Arruntius, and they ask him to stop this madness and restore Rome to its glory. This is just the beginning of the story, and it will gets deeper and very interesting.

The game-play is so simple, at times can be kind of button mashing, first you have two basic attack buttons, and one magic button, of course combining the two attack buttons together will result in a powerful combo.

Your weapons and magic can be upgraded using the challenge points, you can get challenge points throughout the game by killing enemies, and breaking certain objects. This upgrade system is really cool and add depth to the combat.

You don't use the same upgraded weapons, you will get more weapons, learn special magic abilities like using the power of the gods, for example: Pluto will allows you to summon the spirits from the under world to help you in battles. Not just magic, but more weapons like swords, axes.

You will be able to do fatalities too, when you see the enemy life meter turning red, press the action button and you will perform an execution move, killing your enemy in a bloody way.

The game features some hard puzzles too, each puzzle requires you to do a special thing, some of them requires you to go back to a previous area and have to defeat the enemies all over again. It is nice to use your brain in a fighting game, but this game has lots of puzzles, which sometimes could be annoying.

Even if you upgraded your weapons to the maximum, you still get weapon's effects, each weapon has different uses against different enemies, like when you are fighting fast enemy you should use a sword, because axes are heavy and will slow you down, but of course sometimes you will be facing a beast, which you will probably be using axe for its amazing strength.

Bosses are strong and they have special powers, and unique attacks, and they do more damage. Running around a boss will probably leads you to an easy death, in order to kill a boss, you must figure out his weakness, and abuse his attacks pattern.

Gladiator: Sword of vengeance has one of the best graphics on the play station two. The lighting effects are brilliants, the characters looks very nice and real, and the environment has lots of things on it, like fire, lava, blood, and dungeons with darkness looks clear, it is just amazing. And don't forget the incredible cut scenes, where fatalities shows true blood and gore.

The voice acting is good, speeches aren't annoying, and specialty when the gods are talking, they sound pretty harsh and creepy. And the music is good too, I don't remember exactly how it sound, but I was not annoyed.

This game is fairly long, it took me a while to beat, but unfortunate there is no multi player mode, and no replay value to the game.

STORY: [10]
GAME-PLAY: [9]
GRAPHICS: [10]
SOUND: [9]
PLAY TIME: [7]
REPLAY VALUE: [3]

FINAL SCORE: 7 !

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 05/24/05