Dominus Gladiatus Review — Blood on the Sand

When I was younger, I was briefly obsessed with a gladiator management flash game online. The title had you training, equipping, and battling your own gladiators in the colosseum, collecting profits from your wins and starting all over again when your gladiator inevitably fell to the blade. Since I played that game in the early 2010s, there hasn’t really been anything else on the market, at least that has crossed my path, that recreates this incredibly unique gameplay fantasy, leaving an itch unscratched at the back of my mind all these years.

That is, until I got the chance to play Dominus Gladiatus, a gladiator training sim that very closely recreates that same gameplay loop with its own twists.

As you can probably already tell, Dominus Gladiatus has you participating in a campaign of (if I recall correctly) 120 days of gladiator combat. You run your own Ludus, a school where you buy, train, and manage your gladiator slaves before each match. Rival schools occasionally attempt to sabotage your progress until you defeat them in the ring and move on to a more challenging rival, all culminating in your eventual defeat or victory over the games.

The management side of the game is pretty straightforward. You use your limited money, mainly earned by winning battles in the colosseum, to purchase slaves on the market. Yes, the game tries to be fairly historically accurate, so all of your gladiators are slaves who can gain their freedom only by your say-so or after winning 15 matches.

You train your champions at the Ludus by focusing on a series of skills, each corresponding to the character’s chosen class. These skills directly increase your fighter’s statistics, making training one of the most valuable ways to use the precious little time the game allows you before each fight. Training, fighting, and sabotage reduce your gladiator’s morale or increase their fatigue, both of which must also be managed, or they will perform worse in the ring or even take their own lives from the stress. Gladiators can also be equipped with better gear using the money you earn from fights.

The actual fights themselves are auto-battler segments where the gladiators involved use their trained skills and interact with the crowd for buffs or debuffs. These segments are pretty simple, but still entertaining to watch. Like real history, not every battle is to the death, so you don’t always need your gladiator to win to bring home some money, but it certainly helps.

Dominus Gladiatus presents an admittedly satisfying gameplay loop of training up champions and bringing home the gold in deadly blood sports. It is very entertaining, but unfortunately, it lacks the depth to keep you going after the initial few hours.

See, once you really engage with the loop, there isn’t really anything else for you to do. There are very few events outside the typical loop of training, resting, and battling your gladiators. Upgrades are few and happen quickly, and the most interactive among them just have you occasionally click on another character to execute. After a while, the game becomes a lot of waiting around until the next battle, which is often over pretty quickly and doesn’t offer much to entertain you after you’ve seen a dozen of them.

The game could, for example, give you little story events with choices to be made throughout the game, something it does attempt, but only very briefly. Some events that happen when my gladiator goes to the various structures I build for them, for example, could add a good amount of variety to the game. Perhaps we could choose the different arenas we fight in, with different venues having different pros and cons, or further traits could be added to each gladiator to make each purchase a unique experience.

What’s worse is that the management and combat become pretty trivial once you get the hang of things. The only upgrade that really feels necessary is the one that reduces fatigue, which you can buy after you win one or two matches. After that, it’s easy to keep a small group of gladiators constantly training, swapping them out when they need a quick rest. With little investment and using this system, you can field absolute titans of battle who continue to win until they earn their freedom, after which you simply swap them out for the next fighter you’ve been training.

Dominus Gladiatus is a very interesting management sim with a unique setting and idea that you don’t really see elsewhere. Buying, training, and fielding your own gladiators to earn coin and glory is an awesome idea that carries the game on its own for a while. However, the game lacks the depth to keep you going once your initial interest begins to fade. With just a bit more content, Dominus Gladiatus could have become one of my favorite new games. As it stands, the title is just okay, carried heavily by its awesome concept but quickly becoming repetitive and lacking any real replay value.

Still, I recommend you give the game a try. While I don’t know what the game costs at the time of writing, I would easily price the experience at around $20 or less, and I wouldn’t be terribly upset purchasing it at that price. I would also love to see the developers continue updating the game with more content, expanding the gameplay beyond the admittedly fun but ultimately bare-bones state it is in now.

Try Hard Guides was provided a Steam key for this PC review of Dominus Gladiatus. Find more detailed looks at popular and upcoming titles on our Game Reviews page! Dominus Gladiatus is available on Steam.