The Gladiators of Rome is a strategy game that puts you in charge of a team of gladiators in Ancient Rome.  You'll need to buy slaves, equip them with weapons and provide them with training, and then take them into the arena in mortal combat versus other gladiators.  It is not, however, related to the movie Gladiator, although the helmet and the reference to "honor" on the box seem to be placed there to give you that idea.  The drama, intensity, and production values of the award-winning film are not to be found in The Gladiators of Rome - it is strictly budget title material.

When you begin a new game of Gladiators, you are given a purse full of money and charged with turning a slave into a gladiator.  Initially you'll only be able to afford one slave and equip him with the most basic weapons and armor, but should he succeed in the ring he'll soon bring you enough coin to train a full company of gladiators.  The slave market consists of randomly generated slaves rated in three categories: speed, agility, and strength.  Each slave also comes with a basic weapon and with a weapons proficiency in its class.  There seems to be only three or four character models for the slaves, so there's not really any personality to them.  Just pick the one with the best stats that you can afford and move on.

Now it is time to buy weapons for your gladiator.  At first there are only three weapons available in each class, and no more than three types of armor, and they differ only in quality (for example, rusty, average, and master sword).    In an anachronistic twist, you can even buy some weapons that weren't invented until the Middle Ages.  After you advance to the larger arenas more weapons become available, but always as a group of three of the same weapon in varying degrees of quality.  You need to be careful that you have the right gladiator selected when buying weapons, as there doesn't seem to be any way to exchange weapons between gladiators.

The final step before the fight is gladiator training.  Before each fight you can train each gladiator in one area, speed, agility, strength, or life, or add a point to a weapons proficiency.  Training consists of clicking on the stat that you want to increase and paying the cost of the training from your purse.  It would have been nice to be able to train your gladiators in an arena and have their stats improve across the board as a result, but this is a budget title and so you get one click training.

Once all of your gladiators are ready it is off to the arena.  The battles vary in the number of gladiators involved, from one on one duels to larger fights where your troop might be outnumbered two to one.  There are some variations to the battles such as one level which surrounds you with archers or another that challenges you to protect a senator from harm.  In the end, though, they all play out as the same free for all melee on the sands of the arena. 

The combat takes place in real-time, and each gladiator is given an initiative bar.  When the bar is full, you can give an order to the gladiator.  Issuing orders is a simple affair of clicking on the gladiator and then on his target and specifying whether or not to attack, defend, pump up the crowd, or use a special attack.  After you give an order, it is up to the gladiator to execute it, and you'll need to wait for his initiative bar to refill before you can give him another command.  This method works adequately for the one on one duels, but becomes impossible when there are more combatants.  It is impossible to consistently click the desired gladiator or target in the mess of bodies into which a typical fight degenerates.  The game does allow you to pause the action to issue orders, but when you play this way the game is incredibly easy.  Wait until a gladiator is ready, pause the game, issue orders, repeat.  Using this method and some very basic combat tactics you'll quickly move through the various arenas available in the game.  It's too bad there is no middle ground - the game is either impossible or impossibly easy.

When a fight is over, you are awarded gold for the victory, plus bonuses based on the number of special moves executed and the reaction of the crowd.  However, it seems that you'll qualify for the bonuses during the course of a fight without much special effort on your part, so you don't really need to do anything special to maximize your purse.  After the fight it is back to the slave market and armory, and then on to the next match.

The Serious Sam games gave budget-minded gamers hope that future budget titles might actually look good.  Gladiators will bring these gamers back to Earth.  The graphics are very basic, with low polygon counts and jerky animation.  You can issue a "Killing Blow" order to finish off a foe, but the animations for this are not anything special and the finishing blow for a sword-wielding gladiator doesn't even connect with the victim.  Your gladiator will stab at the air to the side of his enemy and the enemy will collapse to the ground; it's like something you might see at a bad Junior High play.

In The End, This Game Hath Been Rated: 35%.  The idea is great, the execution poor.  We can only hope that this is not the only treatment of the subject we'll see in computer gaming.

System Requirements:  Pentium III 500;  64 MB RAM;  8 MB Video RAM; 4x CD-ROM;  300 MB Hard Drive Space;  Mouse.