mckenzie-boyle

The major pitfall that everyone seems to fall into when trying to make a sequel to a standalone classic like Gladiator is deciding which direction to take it. Gladiator II steps in this hole from the off. It's confused and meandering, with absolutely no clear destination in sight, and to be honest, y'all, it's really just a complete mess.

The problem with making sequels to stories like Gladiator is that there's nothing left to say. The original film tells the story it wants to tell, from beginning to end. It's open and shut, the key players are literally dead. There's no more story left to tell, so trying to tell more story is inherently, at the very least, a pretty steep uphill battle. It's a bad idea to start, and just not worth trying to do. But of course, Hollywood loves nothing more than to beat a dead gladiator.

They would have been much better off just writing an entirely new story with new characters and a fresh plot, but of course, this is a Hollywood cash grab, so they chose the lazy, objectively worse route of using characters from the first movie and trying to squish them into the same basic story beats of Gladiator. Unsurprisingly, this results in a disjointed, uncompelling quagmire full of characters you don't care about with relationships and dramatic scenes that feel completely unearned.

Bottom line, if you loved Gladiator for any other reason than the fight scenes, Gladiator II will disappoint you. Honestly, even if you're just here for the fights, you'll probably still be disappointed. Save your money and just watch the first one again.

The best thing you can say for this game is that it's an average, run and gun metroidvania, complete with all the standard things you'd expect with the genre. It has exploration, equipment and weapon upgrades, secret areas - the usual stuff. But that's the best thing you can say.

It doesn't do any of that stuff with much elegance, though. The platforming is often kind of finicky and annoying, the constantly spawning flying enemies are a complete pain, and you start out feeling under powered, then by the end you start feeling overpowered.

Unless you die in the wrong, place, of course. The devs made the galaxy brain decision to take away literally every health, weapon, & ability upgrade you've acquired up to that point when you die, and you have to kill your resurrected corpse to get it back. In principal, it makes some sense. It's thematic, at least. But in practice, it can be a complete game ending nightmare.

If you happen to die in somewhere, say near the end of the game for example, in a place where you have to get through a room with a ton of hard to kill enemies in it, in order to get back to your body. Well, then you're pretty much boned because all you've got to get there is your starting weapon and 99 health. Oh, and if you die in that room? Guess what? That's another new zombie you've got to get through. Did they think this through for even two seconds? They designed a game where if you die in the wrong place, it becomes cumulatively harder and harder to get back to the place you were when you died. Not even FromSoft would do that. Well, that's what happened to me, and that's where I set the game down for good.

So at the end of the day, you have a very average, honestly pretty boring game that's often kind of irritating, and if you die in the wrong spot, you're game is essentially over unless you feel like spending hours trying to get through one bad room. I'm just glad I got it on sale, because there's absolutely no way I would ever pay the full twenty five bucks for this.