I'm gonna take a wild stab and bet you haven't heard much about Gladius, the new Roman-themed bastard son of LucasArts. Well, the game was announced in May of 2002, and is slated to release on all three major gaming systems later this spring. After that, Gladius was just sort of tucked away into a corner of the LucasArts website and left to develop on its own, and it has turned into what promises to be a pretty decent game.

The premise is deceptively simple: you run a school that trains gladiators, and you want to be the best school within the empire. In order to do so, you fight battles with various men, women, and beasts throughout the empire. Battles use hand-to-hand combat, weaponry, and magic, and take place both in and out of various arenas around the empire. You train individual fighters who, as they gain experience, develop strength, combat techniques, and combinations of attacks.

You go left, you go right, I'll....I'll walk around in a circle.

Now we critique, beginning with graphics. The screenshots for this game look really, really good. Arenas look big, spacious, and detailed with excellent textures and environmental objects lying about that apparently gladiators can acquire in the midst of a battle. The outdoor scenes look even better, taking into account lighting and shadows and putting forth the extra effort that gamers have come to expect from LucasArts. On top of this, at the official Gladius web site (http://www.lucasarts.com/products/gladius/), there is a trailer that I was wholly impressed with. The movement of the different characters is fluid and natural looking, with details even down to the facial features and flowing robes and armor around the well-designed characters. You can even see the expressions change on the faces of some of the gladiators during play. The creatures are just as well done, mixing fantasy, reality and mythology in beautifully rendered battles.

As storyline goes, the game is traditional and not terribly complex. The land of Gladius had a balance between light and dark, until man came along and, as man tends to do, screwed everything up. The dark affinities had overrun the land, but the light affinities took pity on man and sent him some protection in the form of Valkyries. Your job is to keep the balance between good and evil. Not a big deal.

Reminds me of my days as a roady for the 'Stones.

The major variety in this game is in the school you run, where you can choose from various gladiators of different classes and styles. Throughout the game you can also encounter magicians, wild animals, and mythological beasts to either dispatch or recruit to your school. Overall there are over 30 classes of fighters, 16 of them historically based, and the others much more fantastic. After finding some fighters, you take your show on the road. There are four major regions, each with smaller towns, and each town with an arena. The arenas vary with the local geography and culture, based both on town and the region and varying from small open arenas in agricultural Pirgos to a 30,000-seater in the capital city of Caltha. Outside of the towns are wilderness arenas that reflect the local landscape, ranging from large, open plains, to deserts, to dense evergreen forests. Battles occur between your school and other schools, with random encounters between your school and various beasts and myths of the surrounding areas. The story is pretty linear, and objective-based, allowing for exploration and for you to complete the tasks assigned you in any order you feel like doing them, but not allowing you to move on until you have found the item, technique, or character you need to drive the story.

But the most important part of any game, the part that allows you to ignore an X-Box in order to play Zelda on your Famicom, is gameplay. The gameplay in Gladius seems to be a strange mix of turn-based and real time fighting. There are turns, but each turn takes place in two parts. During part one, only your characters can move, and the resemblance is strong toward Final Fantasy-style RPG combat. You can also set paths for your characters to follow later on in the turn. The second phase of combat allows you to move the character you have selected, along with allowing the other player or CPU's characters to move, and your other characters to move along a set path, assuming there are no obstacles in the way. Also, where applicable, the crowd will be a factor in the battles. It's an issue of momentum; as you do better, the crowd gets behind you and you can perform beyond your abilities and pull off massive combos, but when you start to fail, you lose support and slide into mediocrity.

Later on, Arnold would have to have a serious talk with the moat contractor.

The battle, however, is truly only half the battle (I've got my Zen Hat on, can you tell?). Before the battles, you must build your team. The gladiator classes posted as of January 30, 2003 are the Centurion, Berserker, and Samnite. The Centurion is a member of the Imperial army, and is a highly trained born leader who can inspire other characters to go beyond their normal capabilities. The Berserker, from the dark evergreen forests of the northern territories, is a willful, unarmored class who fights from pure rage and endures years of painful conditioning in order to be able to shrug off vicious blows in combat. The Samnite is the largest class so far, wielding huge swords and heavy weaponry, and generally just being scary.

I AM THE MIGHTYBEACHHOUSETIKIGOD! You might remember me as Kevin, from the Wonder Years.

So, to summarize, this actually looks like a pretty decent game, much to my surprise. I wouldn't buy it outright, just yet, but it seems like the kind of thing that would very well be worth renting for a weekend in order to see if it lives up to its looks. A kudo (not kudos, only one) goes out to LucasArts for making what will, at least, be an interesting Roman-themed game.

Steve Gazzo