Gladiator

Gladiator is a video game in the action genre developed by Forgotten Sages and published by Forgotten Sages originally released in 1995. It is currently playable on DOS.

Gladiator is a fun real-time action/RPG game with a good dose of strategy.

You control a team of mercenaries fighting for glory and riches. Along the way, you'll explore a fantasy world full of typical monsters such as undead, elementals, and so on. In RPG style, your Gladiators will gain levels and new powers as they defeat more opponents and accumulate treasures. The gameplay is easy to learn, although the graphics may seem too amateurish for some. You start with some money which you use to hire warriors, archers, slimes and other creatures to build up a small army. You then train and control these members as they fight monsters in real time. Up to four players can play on a single team, and you can split the group into smaller ones if you wish. A nice feature is that you can control one unit at a time and leave the rest to the computer, or the whole army simultaneously. Battles are fairly simple: you only have a few options, such as melee attacks, ranged attacks and the use of special abilities (e. g. healing and turning undead for healers). As the game takes place in real time, it is not uncommon to see dozens of units at once on the screen, and the only thing you will have time to do is to keep your troops together so that no unit goes off alone in a suicide attack. Some maps (i. e. levels) have special features, such as teleporters or locked doors, but the terrain is usually only used to help you plan your attacks or to protect you from enemies. As in the Warhammer games, the story is told as you progress from map to map, in the form of a journal. Sometimes you'll get an ally or two during the scene (however, they seem to die easily).

Overall, I enjoyed Gladiator. The mix of RPG, action, and some strategy elements is pretty well blended and scrambled. If you like action kill-all games with more depth, Gladiator is well worth your time and $10 for the registered version (which offers more levels and unit types). It's a great investment, especially since up to 4 players can play, and you get a nice level editor as a bonus for this great underdog. Best of all, in 2002, the designer was kind enough to release the source code under GPL license, and the result is OpenGlad, a polished port of the game made by a team of hobbyists. The SDL version (for Windows) is the one you can download here, as well as the original shareware version for DOS. For Linux and other versions of OpenGlad, see the official website.

It is possible that we have multiple downloads available when different versions exist.