While there are some addictive elements, Colosseum walks a thin line between fun and tedium.

User Rating: 6 | Colosseum: Road to Freedom PS2
By drswank | Review Date:
With all of the theatrics and history of gladiatorial combat, it was only a matter of time before a trend would start for the genre. Following closely behind Capcom’s Shadow of Rome, Koei, the masters of historical retellings through the video game medium, bring us Colosseum: Road to Freedom. While wrought with its own shortcomings and tedious hack-n-slash gameplay, there is at least a little bit of good here that may sway a rental if anything. You start the game by answering a series of questions about yourself such as past occupations and gods you worship which will determine what kind of gladiator you will become. Once your gladiator has been created, you learn the ropes of combat in a small slave camp with wooden swords. After a few battles, you’re sold to a man named Magerius where he extends an offer to train you properly to fight for him and in exchange, he’ll allow you to buy your freedom if you manage to live that long. Life in the gladiator training camp is governed by your fight schedule. On the off days, you’ll train and gain points which you can exchange for food that will boost your stats. All of the atypical stats are here like strength, dexterity, vitality, and stamina. These stats govern how much damage you do, your likeliness to be disarmed, how long you can fight before getting winded and so on. Training exercises are comprised of small mini games that rely on timing and rhythm game style button presses. The better you do, depending on the difficulty of the training you choose, the more points can be earned. Fight days commonly begin with Magerius gathering the members of his gladiator camp and choosing who will go and fight which you will always be picked – lucky you! When you arrive at the arena, you can equip yourself with a small (and pretty trashy) assortment of weapons that are provided for free. If you’ve seen a few hours of combat yourself, you can suit up from a storage box where you keep your items that you’ve earned. Once you’re suited up, you can choose from a number of battles that vary depending on your skill level. Despite the different objectives, the gameplay essentially boils down to hacking and slashing your way to victory. You’ll engage in everything from ten man battle royals and team battles to killing beasts and of course, the one-on-one duels. Each type of battle will pay differently depending on the objective. For instance, some battle royals will end when there’s only one man left standing while others require you to survive for a certain amount of time in order to win. Naturally, the last man standing battles will pay better than timed. Once you win a certain number of battles, you’ll advance to the next rank which will let you enter into the better paying battles as well as reaching near superstar status. Battles are the main part of the game as well as where many of its drawbacks appear. You’ll be sure to notice the clunky controls right off the bat as it’s hard to control which direction your gladiator is swinging. The four face buttons control the type of attack you’ll execute. Triangle attacks high, X attacks low, and the square and circle buttons attack to the right and left. You can also assign special attacks to each of the buttons. Special moves can knock back enemies, unleash a flurry of strikes, or increase your likeliness to disarm your foes. Depending on which stance you take (one sword stance, dual weapon stance, large shield stance, etc) you’ll gain levels as you use them. Once a level is gained, you can upgrade any of your special moves. The most vital element in battle is your ability to dodge since your performance and ability to entertain all seem to be governed by it. The ability to dodge takes timing and you’ll have to watch any opponents around you and hit R1 when they take a swing. The more you dodge, the more the crowd is entertained and the bigger personal bonuses you’ll receive which helps since 90% of your earnings go towards paying off your owner not to mention that healing doesn’t come cheap either. Lucky for you, the enemy AI helps to cut back on those pesky healing costs. While they may some signs of intelligence at the start of a battle, they’re quick to become as dumb as a ton of bricks once the true chaos unfolds. You’ll often see AI run into environmental hazards repeatedly or get stuck on dead bodies and walls. When there isn’t anything to get in the way of their advances, they’re usually content with surrounding you and swinging their weapons. The best part of Colosseum: RTF lies in collecting upgraded weapons and armor which you can get from defeated enemies. Once you defeat an enemy they’ll drop everything they’re carrying leaving their items open for you to scavenge. You’ll be overcome with giddiness as you find a sword that will add 62 points to your strength or a better and sometimes cooler looking helmet for you to wear. There are a wide assortment of weapons to choose from such as swords, maces, flails, pikes, spears, as well as different varieties of shields, helmets, arm, and leg guards. The most frustrating aspects of Colosseum are the lack of save points at the three different arenas you’ll be fighting in. With such a huge debt to pay off, you’ll find yourself entering into any battle that you can qualify for in an attempt to get out of slavery faster. You’ll find yourself fighting three to four battles and losing the fifth only to lose your equipment and paying half of your personal funds to be nursed back to health. Instead of opting to rebuild your gladiator, you’ll be reaching for the reset button and starting everything over again. Another drawback is you’re forced to fight battles from the top of the list to the bottom. If you have a duel scheduled for the day and you want to fight in it first, you won’t be able to participate in any of the other battles being held since duels are always at the bottom of the list. Any trip to the Colosseum is a gamble both with your character and your own personal time. There are traces of a storyline present as told through a series of poorly edited and sometimes repetitive cut scenes. Fortunately, you’ll be able to skip a lot of these cut scenes. Once in a while, you’ll have scenes which focus on pivotal parts of the storyline like when you’re forced to enter into a staged fight. Some of these scenes help fill out your otherwise mute character since you’ll be able to choose responses to smack talk from opponents, but no good will come of it since the game follows one linear storyline from beginning to end and is void of any kind of story branches. The visuals in Colosseum: RTF are mixed. Models look great, animate really well, and show some visual signs of fatigue and damage. The drawback is that there are only three types of characters fighting with only their equipment to differentiate them from each other. There are also only three arenas to fight in being the slave camp, the Atilus Arena, and the Roman Colosseum. This can be taken differently since the initial slave camp is only available during the first thirty minutes of gameplay, so there are technically only two arenas to fight in. Arena crowds are comprised of a number of two-dimensional sprites that contain only a couple frames of animation and lack any overall detail. You’ll earn Plumas and coronas for your victories, but don’t expect to see them raining down on the battlefield. Sound fares better than the visuals with a pounding soundtrack worthy of a game based off of gladiatorial combat though they’re recycled often. Swords clank against each other as well as shields realistically as well. Voice acting is passable with a lot of repeated dialog during cut scenes. During battle, you’ll get the same few lines of recycled dialog from your cookie-cutter teammates and opponents. Pivotal battles with important characters add some variety to the dialog but it’s few and far between. Colosseum: Road to Freedom isn’t the greatest game to chronicle gladiatorial combat, but it manages to at least do a few things right. While the elements of leveling your character to the highest class of gladiator are slightly addictive, the game manages to mess up combat, which is the one thing that makes a game about gladiators remotely enjoyable.

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