All hype and bad design makes this one of the worst F2P games available.
The optional settings for this game give you the option to turn on gore and nudity. That's it. I'm not joking. That is terrible! How about a little more, Ubisoft! I want more options than blood and breasts. To give us this little, even in a F2P game, is insulting to us gamers.
Graphically, there's nothing here to write home about. It is neither great nor terrible. They're just slightly sub-par. Some textures could be better here and there but that's about it.
This game suffers the most from poor gameplay mechanics. Some fighting games have decent balancing with some interesting characters. This game has neither. The formula to win is basically mash the buttons til someone dies. When you pause the game during a single player fight you can look at the combo list. Don't worry, it's the same for almost every gladiator. Just look at it then go back to slamming the X/Square button.
What is, quite possibly, the ultimate fail of this game is the fact that you don't have your save data on your hard drive. Nope. Ubisoft stores all of the save data from all players of this game on their servers. This method of saving data made the game unplayable on day one for the Xbox 360. Today (day two) they took the servers down for a couple of hours to fix the issue. The issue still remains though. THEY HAVE OUR SAVE DATA!!! The worst part about that is - because that's how data is saved - this game CANNOT be played offline. So if you lose your internet connection, take your console on a trip with no internet, join the military and are stationed where you cannot get internet to something like a console, you're hosed.
The best part of this game is the customization options for the different gladiators that you buy. You unlock more armor pieces and weapons by proceeding through the game in both single-player and multi-player fights. In single-player you fight against AI controlled opponents that range from easy to @&$#@!%. Many tend to be in the latter category.
I know I'm not the best person at fighting games, but when a fight should be somewhat easy by the stats ratings and then you get your butt handed to you by that same opponent then something is wrong. The AI has a nasty tendency to just go berserk and not let you even move. Then your defense gauge gives out and you're wide open to attacks and cannot defend yourself. You have to go through such fights in order to unlock more pieces to customize your stable of gladiators.
The @&$#@!% fights are where the game really needed to have had a difficulty setting that could be changed. These fights aren't fun, they can take a long time to get past, and they are what you remember the game for. That's not good!
With all Free to Play games you expect some shortcuts to be taken in places a lot of the time. This game took too many shortcuts just so they could get it out. If it is unfinished then it isn't ready to be released. I wish game publishers would learn that. This game, clearly, needed another 4-6 months of development time. As it is all we got is an unfinished, unrefined, uncoordinated mess of a title. I guess we DID get what we paid for this time.
Please, do not download this game. Show Ubisoft that we, as gamers, will not tolerate these practices. If we don't then they will continue to publish unfinished/unwanted products with appalling business practices.