Gladio Mori is a bit of an odd game, really. Technically, it’s a very dangerous fight to the death between two combatants armed with medieval weapons from various places and times. Technically, one wrong move could result in you losing an arm, your head, and, worst of all, the fight. But it is all physics-based. You and your enemies are physically simulated models that are just barely capable of standing up and walking unaided, which transforms these technically very dangerous bouts into comically awkward messes about 80 percent of the time.
The game is simple in almost all respects. The campaign is just a lengthy series of fights against the AI to get through. You could probably do it in half an hour if you were good at the game, but you’re not good enough for that yet because losing a match – that is, two out of three rounds – sends you right back to the beginning.
Thankfully, there are difficulty settings to help you get used it a bit. On easy, you have 50 points to spend on your equipment, more effective armour costing you more points, and the game runs at 0.25x speed. That’s super slomo, which will help you get to grips with the…interesting combat.
Fighting is mostly enjoyable – for a while. It has this issue where your weapons get stuck in your enemies for extended periods, sometimes so much that you can’t actually free them and end up awkwardly hugging until one of you bleeds to death. Once you learn to try and avoid that, there is some enjoyment to be had.
Gladio Mori is ridiculous and silly, with the incredibly strange way the fighters walk and the attacks being slow with little force behind them. Despite that, when you walk towards an enemy and neatly slice their head off with your katana you still feel like medieval John Wick, even though it’s usually about 60 percent an accident.
The biggest issue is that it just gets old very quickly. There are a lot of weapons to play with, each with their own moveset to get used to, but once you’ve tried a few there just isn’t much to do. There are only two modes in addition to the campaign, local, which allows you to set up custom games, and multiplayer, which is also what it sounds like. I’ve tried a couple of multiplayer games but they were both a bit laggy in addition to slomo, which is a bit of a pain to account for when playing.
You can make your own movesets on PC, but not on console, though you can use these custom-made movesets on console thanks to mod.io integration. This also comes with skins for the crash test dummy-looking characters you play as well. I tried a couple of these movesets as well but found the ones I tried to be even more ridiculous, I suppose. They were basically over-the-top anime-style combat moves in a game where it didn’t seem to fit and would be absolutely awful to try and fight against, so I just didn’t like the ones I tried, but there are plenty of others.
This is a game that is built for ridiculousness. Play it with some friends and you’ll no doubt find some hilarity alongside some brutal-looking kills. You can do that both online and in local multiplayer. Outside of that, there just isn’t enough here to keep someone interested on their own. The campaign is identical every time you try it and so long that, by the time you get to the guy with the giant shield, you’re just annoyed at him for cheating by using a giant shield. There is just no longevity to be found here, it’s a game you’ll play a bit and then never look back at it. It’s like Gorn without the VR and absurd enemies. All you’re left with is repetitive, sub-standard combat.