The Gladiators: The Galactic Circus Games Updated Preview

Real-time strategy is one of the most popular genres on the PC, but for a while, most real-time strategy games seemed pretty formulaic; in many games, you would harvest resources, build your base, build up armies, and rush your opponents before they could do the same to you. But recently, we've seen real-time strategy games incorporate interesting new features, like hack-and-slash role-playing elements in Warcraft III and strategic planning phases in Shogun and Medieval: Total War. Arxel Tribe's The Gladiators: The Galactic Circus Games will attempt to distinguish itself by going in the opposite direction--instead of introducing even more layers of strategic depth and bigger, longer technology trees to research, The Gladiators will be a fast-paced game that will put hardly any emphasis on resource management or building bases and will focus exclusively on lots of fast-paced, tactical battles.

When we last saw The Gladiators, it was in a prerelease state, but the game is now feature-complete and is actually available at retail in some parts of Europe. The Gladiators will also become available in North America early this year, but we were able to take a firsthand look at the final version of the game, which has improved graphics and all of the game's final missions. As we've mentioned previously, The Gladiators' story will resemble something out of the classic Flash Gordon or Buck Rogers comic books, which seems appropriate, considering its colorful, cartoon-style graphics; the game will even use comic-book-style cinematics, as well as real-time in-engine cutscenes. Like those classic comic books, The Gladiators' story will feature a modern-day American soldier, in this case Major Greg D. Callahan of the US Marines, who gets blasted into a futuristic, alien world and must fend for himself--in this case, in a huge, intergalactic arena where aliens and robots fight to the death to please huge crowds of spectators.

But the game's story is really just an excuse to set up massive real-time battles between diverse armies of different units. Like many real-time strategy games that have come after Blizzard's groundbreaking game Starcraft, The Gladiators will have three very different playable sides. The game will let you side with Callahan and his squad of human marines, who have access to conventional weaponry; the robotic Galactic soldiers led by the imposing robot gladiator Maximix; or the magic-using soldiers of the alien general Fargasse. The Gladiators will have a total of 18 single-player missions, which you'll need to unlock in single-player story mode. You'll play the first seven missions as the humans, the next six as the Galactics, and then the final five as the magic-using troops of Fargasse.

The Gladiators' single-player campaign will, as you might expect, become progressively more challenging with each mission. However, the structure of each mission will differ greatly from the missions you'd expect from a standard real-time strategy game. In The Gladiators, base-building consists of simply selecting the location of your home base and clicking to confirm, and since resource-gathering consists only of grabbing "Joker card" power-up items on the map to gain "energy" before your opponents do, you won't spend any time researching up to a certain level of technology or chopping wood. Instead, you'll fight battles using different tactics.

The Gladiators' tactical considerations are simple and intuitive and generally seem easy to use. Taking the high ground, by climbing a hill or a guard tower, will provide a height advantage that will make your units deal additional damage to their enemies below, though if you happen to be creeping through a terrain depression like a canyon or behind a cliff, you'll be able to hide in the fog of war that borders the high ground and mount an ambush. Similarly, if you move your units through dense cover, you may be able to avoid some damage and even creep up on your enemies unseen, but when you do attack, your own weapon fire may be obstructed. The Gladiators' 3D engine allows for fully destructible terrain, so you can't hide in the bushes forever, as your enemies will eventually destroy your cover, but you can also cut through trees and other objects on the map with your own weapon fire to clear alternate paths to your goals or ferret out any hidden enemies.

Let the Games Begin

Similarly, you'll find that in The Gladiators, different units will deal different types of damage, much like in Starcraft. For instance, the human marines have direct-fire and indirect-fire weapons, each of which is useful against various types of enemies at various ranges. Though different units have different amounts of health and armor and deal different types and amounts of damage, most of the game's units move at a brisk pace, and they even gradually regain lost health over time when they're not being attacked, so you won't have to worry about carefully micromanaging every last step your units take and every last point of health they lose.

Generating units is simply a matter of clicking on your base structure and queuing up units, which get churned out extremely quickly. You can support your units with spell-like abilities that you'll recover on the maps by picking up power-up items. You can have only five different power-up abilities at a time, but five slots for different special abilities seem to be enough to keep a game of The Gladiators interesting. You can pick up items that let you heal your troops, make them move faster, and increase the amount of damage they deal, among other things. You can access these special abilities easily by clicking onscreen icons or by using the appropriate function-key shortcuts.

The actual fights in The Gladiators are fast-paced, and in the single-player game, they begin almost immediately. Different units fill different roles, but using decoys to draw out enemy troops seems to be an effective tactic, as is seizing the high ground as quickly as possible. The developers at Arxel Tribe want the battles to be so fast-paced that they almost resemble a classic twitch-based arcade game--or as the developers call them, "tactical puzzles." In one of the later missions in the humans' single-player campaign, Callahan and his men are trapped in a computerized prison bounded by rivers. If he and his squad can manage to defeat a swarm of enemies, a bridge will spawn across the next river, but in this mission, you must make good use of cover and environmental objects, especially on higher difficulty settings. In the most hectic battles at the highest difficulty levels, The Gladiators will feature up to 500 different units fighting onscreen at once.

Of course, the most challenging matches you'll have playing The Gladiators will be multiplayer battles against skilled human opponents. And since The Gladiators puts hardly any emphasis on building up a base or acquiring resources, you will be able to jump into any multiplayer game at any time and be on roughly even footing with your competitors, rather than being overwhelmed by the guys who had already built their base and researched their strongest technologies 10 minutes ago.

You'll be able to play multiplayer matches using The Gladiators' peer-to-peer multiplayer client, which operates independently of any central servers. Basically, if you've got an Internet connection, you can host a game--the faster your connection, the better, of course. The Gladiators' multiplayer client will essentially consist of a player-matching interface that shows games that are taking place on the Internet. Arxel Tribe is currently working on improving the interface for the US version, but the multiplayer mode is implemented and working in Europe. And if you do decide to host a game of The Gladiators, you won't need to leave your computer on all night, since if a game's host logs off, server hosting is transferred automatically to the remaining player who has been in the game for the longest time.

Many recent real-time strategy games have emphasized strategic depth and complexity, and as most real-time strategy fans will tell you, that's a good thing. However, The Gladiators' streamlined, fast-action gameplay is different from most other real-time strategy games and may prove to be a refreshing change of pace when the game is released in March.