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Gladiator: Sword of Vengeance Hands-On Impressions

We check out the PC version of Acclaim's upcoming hack-and-slash action game at ECTS.

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On a recent visit to Nvidia's booth at ECTS, we discovered a PC that was running a build of Acclaim's Gladiator: Sword of Vengeance. The game was primarily on the booth to show off its Nvidia-powered visuals, but we did manage to spend a little time playing it--even managing to defeat a boss character of sorts.

When we picked the game up, we found ourselves on some kind of island floating in the sky that appeared to act as a hub between levels. The island had areas of long grass that moved quite convincingly in the wind, but very little of else of interest, save for an open doorway into a level. The level we were transported to took place on a beach where the sea was lapping in and out and made for a quite tranquil scene in which to use our sword to break open the numerous barrels that were looking out of place and spoiling the view. Swinging our sword was the only move available to us at that time, but that changed as soon as we were confronted by a number of skeleton warriors that crawled up through the sand. The scene was more than a little reminiscent of Jason and the Argonauts, and since we were horribly outnumbered, we were pleased to discover that our sword-swinging move was now complemented by hand-to-hand combat and dodge actions.

The combat itself was mindless, for the most part--we mashed the buttons, and the energy bars above the enemies' heads got smaller and smaller until they fell down. Being outnumbered did occasionally mean that we found a use for the dodge button, and there were a couple of occasions when the skeletons positioned their shields in such a way that only punch and kick moves could reach them--but that's about as complicated as things got.

At the end of the beach we came across a large statue of a skeleton warrior that came to life as we approached it. The statue didn't actually attack us, though, but rather transported us to a relatively small arena where we had only 60 seconds to finish off around 10 regular skeletons and one much larger one. Our first few attempts at the level failed, but when we discovered that we could use "Herculean power magic" to power up our moves at the touch of a button, the enemies started falling much more quickly. The magic meter appeared to replenish each time we successfully hit an enemy, and we were able to power up--which resulted in our character briefly being surrounded by some reasonably good flame effects--twice within the 60-second time limit.

After defeating the skeleton boss, we were allowed into a previously inaccessible cave level where there were more skeletons to kill, more barrels to smash, some gaps to jump, and a couple of key-based puzzles to sort out. The gameplay got repetitive pretty fast, in truth, but assuming that there are some different and more challenging enemies to take on in the later stages of the game, there's no reason why Gladiator shouldn't turn out to a quite playable, if mindless, action game.

For more information on Gladiator: Sword of Vengeance, which is currently scheduled for release in November, check out our previous coverage of the game.

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