Spartacus Legends Preview

Spartacus is a bit of a cult TV hit, featuring lots of over the top fighting produced in a fashion fairly reminiscent of 300, and rather a lot of adult content. So a free to play tie in game is almost certain to get a bit of a following.

Spartacus Legends lets you build up your own Ludus (gladiator school), managing a group of gladiators and training them up so you can take them and face off against other gladiators in the arena. There’s a lot of content backing up this fighting game, but the fights are still absolutely at the core of the game.

You face off against another gladiator either locally or over the internet, in a 3D arena which will be familiar to anyone this side of Soul Calibur. You have the standard block, quick attack, heavy attack, kick, dodge and Z-axis movement at your disposal on the gamepad, but the differentiation comes from the fighting style.

[drop2]The only two weapon setups I played with in the limited demo were sword and Roman shield and a double sword. They certainly looked and felt different enough that you should be able to find a particular fighting style that suits you best in battle, but close enough that it shouldn’t give anyone a big advantage over others. We’ll have to see how the remaining fighting styles pan out, but it will certainly be balanced closely to keep things competitive.

The fighting itself was nice, heavy and satisfying. On screen you have a health meter at the top, with an orange armour protection meter right below it, which can lessen some of the blows you take and depletes as you make blocks. Along the bottom you have a crowd meter which shows which fighter the crowd is supporting. You can fill it up by stringing together hits and taunting your opponent, all helping to build up your fighters fame level in the wider game and give you a variety of finishing moves for when you have defeated an opponent.

These finishing moves are hilarious in their brutality. When you’ve won the bout you get a few face buttons to chose from, not really knowing what they’ll produce, but they are brilliantly varied. I saw a 300 style slow motion leap to stab someone in the eye, a double sworded stab through a head, and my personal favourite, cutting off the gladiator’s face.

Luckily, if your prize fighter loses and gets their face cut off you can pay a medic to try and heal him back up; clearly the Roman health service was incredibly advanced if you could pay for it. It’s a good way to keep people invested in the game, and let them build their favourite fighter up to the very top rungs even with a few losses. However, if you can’t pay the medic, your fighter isn’t going to be coming back.

As you win and gain fame and money, you gradually unlock more equipment and characters, including some of the key players in the TV series. Being a free to play title, there are naturally micro-transactions which will let you add more in game cash to your coffers but in order to really progress through the game you need to become more famous and level up in order to unlock the things to buy. This unlock system means that the micro-transactions are absolutely not pay-to-win, something that will likely make for a better game.

Spartacus Legends feels like it’s going to be a pretty good tie in game, and a first little toe being dipped into the waters of F2P on home consoles for Ubisoft. The overall management side should couple well with the bombastic fighting too, so the only thing missing from the TV show is the gratuitous sex, though there may have been a topless lady in the crowd…