Defence Squad: Gladius

This Defence Squad piece is a little different from ones that I've written before, in that critics weren't overly harsh on this game. I think they saw it as pleasant or pretty good, but few were calling it terrific or mindblowing. No, this is a case of an old-style game being passed over by the general public, which is a damned shame, as Gladius is the last great non-Star Wars game that LucasArts ever made.

LucasArts' history is really quite fascinating to me. In the 1990s, they were one of, if not the best gaming developer in the world. Their company was essentially split in two – the one half cranking out pretty great Star Wars-based games in TIE Fighter, Shadows of the Empire, Dark Forces, and Super Star Wars. The other half, however, was consistently churning out the brainiest and most invigorating games (primarily in the adventure genre, although with a few detours like with Afterlife). To this day, Loom, Grim Fandango and Secret of Monkey Island are some of my all-time favourite games.

Fast forward to the 2000s. The company was under new management, Grim Fandango, for all of its charms, was a commercial bust, and the company's entire profits were less than what just one game (Halo) had made in a year. Management's solution was to prune the company from 400-ish employees down to 150, move all development in-house, and cut off the dying limb that was their adventure gaming division. It was a sad time for staunch LucasArts supporters such as myself, especially when it seemed that LucasArts (and George Lucas himself) had become more cynical in their use and over-use of the Star Wars brand. The superstars of their adventure games, like Tim Schaefer and Ron Gilbert, didn't really have a place in this new LucasArts.

In this climate, then, it's a small miracle that Gladius got made at all. At first glance the game may seem to just be a strategy game version of the movie Gladiator (and as I was a big fan of that movie at the time, I decided to check this game out), but it's so much more than that. The best way I would describe Gladius to a newcomer is as a strange mashup between Fire Emblem and golfing.

The game allows you to play as either Valens, a betrayed Roman knight, or as Ursula, a Norse princess. For different reasons that I won't get into here, they both end up having to enter into the world of gladiatorial combat. The plot isn't the game's strongpoint, but neither is it a weakness – it's actually quite well-told. If I had one complaint about it, though, it's that the two stories eventually overlap, about ten hours into the game. Although this makes replaying the game easier, as you can just stop once you get to that point, it would have been nice to have two fully-featured stories, even though this is more than the developers had to do in the first place.

It's in the gameplay where the game shines, and it's also where it becomes quite Fire Emblem-y. Your character travels to four different lands, and in each land, there are a variety of gladiator arenas. You and your team of gladiators that you put together throughout the game (either by purchasing their allegiance or through plot-related machinations) then fight through the ranks in a variety of different types of battles. Some might be timed, some might require you to meet a certain objective or to only fight with certain types of warriors, or some might just be a free-for-all where you have to defeat all of your enemies. It's never boring.

The fights take place on a Fire Emblem-style grid, where you take turns moving your characters or attacking surrounding enemies. The game is also not strictly historical, as it allows you to have archers, dervishes and mages too. All of them behave differently and a good part of the fun of the first few hours is honing your strategic mind to know what type of warrior to use where. There's also a rock-paper-scissors, heavy-medium-light warrior class setup, where a fast warrior with a dagger might be able to beat up one of the big, hammer-using brutes.

The game is incredibly challenging, but in a cerebral way, which is my favourite kind of challenge (as someone without very much skill in most action-based games, if we're being quite honest). Every battle feels like you're going up against insurmountable odds – yet, the difficulty is so well-balanced that it's never frustrating, or if it is, the addictive quality of the gameplay (just one more arena!) keeps you coming back. Here's where the golfing part comes in – instead of standard turn-based attacks, the game has a variety of "swing meters" that require precise button presses to deal the most damage to an enemy. It adds a level of interactivity that's often missing from these types of games (even if those swing meters do eventually become old hat by the time you've sunk forty hours into the game).

Really, there's almost nothing to find fault with in the game. It's a really well-made and fun game that taxes your brain and has an awesome setting. There's no getting around the fact that it's based on older, more methodical gameplay standards. That may not be up the alley of most people, but it certainly is for me. It's a shame, though, because besides this and a few games that LucasArts have published for other developers, there hasn't been anything non-Star Wars related to come out, and even fewer to be successful. If we want to see developers take risks (even though a turn-based strategy game hardly seems risky, it truly is in this gaming climate), we have to buy games that take those risks. I wish people would have done that for Gladius.