Spartacus: Legends

Legen - don’t wait for it.

Spartacus: Legends is a free 1-on-1 fighter for the XBOX 360 and the PS3, based on Starz Entertainment’s popular Spartacus series.  It is also one of the most frustratingly problematic games on the market at this time.  Frustrating, I say, not terrible.  It has more than its own proper share of badness to spread around, but this is one of those frustrating games that isn’t just terrible, there are some fundamentally good ideas that are either poorly implemented or implemented in such a half-assish way that they become defunct or annoying, while other, terrible ideas are given the full light of day and ride down the red carpet.

Ultimately, this is a game with a great deal of solid potential that is squandered and ruined by abhorrently over-implemented freemium tactics, unnatural RPG elements, poor presentation and what seems like a genuinely general and generally genuine lack of friendliness toward the player.  This game, more than any other that I have played, illustrates anything and everything that is wrong with the “freemium” model.

Stepping into the arena...

The shame with this game is that when they work, the actual fighting mechanics in the arena really work.  The fights themselves, taking place in a 3-dimensional space very much akin to Soul Calibur, manage to present an excellent sense of movement, tension, aggression, defense, strategy and genuine fun.  From Soul Calibur it borrows the aforementioned 3-dimensional fighting space, from Mortal Kombat it borrows a kind of twitchy, brutal and pointed control scheme, and from Tekken and Virtua Fighter it borrows a kind of half-hashed realism: weapons are believable, the tactics and animations associated with them are seemingly realistic, and it maintains a nice loftiness between this feigned realism and a game that is fun.

Furthermore, the classes are more or less balanced.  As is always the case in 1-on-1 games, some classes do stand out as a bit overpowered (the trident class has reach and flexibility, and a devilishly unfair speed to match) but on the whole the balance is good between similarly equipped players

My only real complaint on gameplay matters is in the control structure.  Soul Calibur made the square or A button the seat for horizontal attacks, which were generally quicker, less susceptible to dodging and thereby less damaging, while vertical attacks were slower and easier to dodge, but carried more weight.  Here, one button is quick attacks, one is heavy attacks, one button is melee and another button activates throws.  This doesn’t seem like an issue at first, but eventually when the game is forcing you to play in an unfamiliar style it becomes frustrating when you spend half of a fight trying to figure out which combos and attacks strike in a horizontal or vertical motion.

Even this could be overlooked for the sake of the defense and crowd dynamic systems.  The game relegates blocking, dodging and rolling, which helps you put distance between yourself and a foe, to a single defense bar which recharges somewhat slowly.  As a game mechanic, this works surprisingly well, encouraging both players to press the assault all the time and heightening the pace of the battles.  As this is happening, both players keep a certain amount of crowd favor which is lost or gained as the player does poorly or well, respectively.  If the player has crowd favor and has managed to lower the defenses of his opponent, he or she could very well end a match in what is technically the first round.  In a similar vein, if the player wins a match with crowd favor, they are able to execute the oppositional party in a brief nod to Mortal Kombat.

One facet of the game which I found particularly frustrating the complete absence of a training mode where combos can be tested on a dummy, or where the dodging and parrying mechanics can be tested and learned in a safe, non-threatening environment.  I managed to play the game for at least two or three hours until I figured out how the dodge and parry systems are even supposed to work, but even then there was no theater in which I could practice the skills necessary to use these mechanics without any risk.

These game mechanics, which form the core fighting experience of the game, are solid, but the death knells truly start ringing when one turns to the AI fights.  Simply put, the difficulty curve is too steep.

Frankly, it’s much too honest to call it a difficulty curve, when the experience is much more akin to walking along a sunlit summer valley before being suddenly commanded to climb a space elevator with your bare hands.  Early fights are manageable, but as soon as the difficulty spikes, it does so with such a rabid, careless ferocity that the player is merely left befuddled.

The chief problem surrounding the difficulty seems to be the game’s menu-based equipment and gladiator constructs.

Very early on, the only weapons and armor available to you without spending actual money are literally described as “soiled”, “rusty”, and “worn”, while the only weapons available in a number of classes are described as “wooden”, “rusty”, “bent”, and “blunt”.  Mind you, this is not only in the first half hour or first three hours.  Some classes still only have wooden weapons available after a solid 5 or 6 hours spent with the game.

What’s more, equipment forms the essential basis of your gladiator’s health, defense meter and weapon damage, and unless you start spending real money very early in the game, you will find yourself very quickly outmatched and laughably so.  The first “boss” character boasts an equipment rating over 200 at a point when the best the stingy player can bring at that point in the game might be around 40 or 50.

This equipment issue is only worsened by the gladiator system.  Gladiators, whose names, physical details and weapon styles are all immutable, come with base statistics befitting their price.  Some decent gladiators are available for in-game currency, but to get the really good gladiators in the really good classes one must spend real money.  You can customize gladiators with perks, but different levels of gladiator (differentiated by price) have set numbers of perk slots, and replacing a perk with another perk which is just as justly earned costs real money.

The way this dynamic is set up frustrates me, because there is a great chance in this mechanic to make the player invested in their gladiators, watching them form and grow into bigger, better, stronger, faster characters.  After all, that’s more or less literally the premise on which amazing games like Skyrim and Far Cry 3 are based.  Furthermore, this kind of development would be thematically appropriate, since essentially every iteration of the story of Spartacus from which the game draws its name has sought to emphasize that through effort, devotion and determination even the most insignificant man can forge himself into a legend.  Hell, if you were to write a consummate thesis for every retelling of Spartacus’ story, that or something like a generic “slavery is bad” would probably be it.

Instead, gladiators often need to be discarded so that the player can purchase a certain class for a certain fight, and in the end gladiators are just as disposable as the items they are sent into battle with.

What’s more, just in case you had any plans of developing a kind of emotional attachment to your characters, the aforementioned crowd dynamic system makes it so that in the wrong arena even the closest of losses can make you lose your character.  You can revive him two or three times with in-game currency, but after 3 times you have to spend real money.

The point I’m driving at here is that this isn’t just a freemium game, this is an example of a game that is specifically ruined by the freemium model.

Progression past the most basic levels of the game is impossible unless one is either very skilled at 1-on-1 fighters or very willing to spend money.  The freemium mechanics here, buying gladiators, buying their weapons, buying their health and losing them when you don’t buy good enough gladiators and buy good enough weapons, are obviously designed to lure the foolish, the unskilled and especially the unskilled fools into sinking more money.

“Use real money”, the game says in a sinister tone, “to buy good gladiators good weapons so you don’t lose them.”  Then, when it throws an obscene challenge at you it pats your head calmly and says, “It’s okay, just spend more money and you can keep the gladiator.”

Maybe I’m just too averse to paying for something that’s supposedly free, but this is how freemium games have always made me feel.

My real problem is that with the freemium model, spending real money becomes a gameplay mechanic, rather than something which is wholly separate to the gameplay experience.  Spartacus: Legends doesn’t want you to come in and do well and beat the game so you can sit back and say, “Wow, that was a really good time!  I will forever cherish that video game experience.”

Spartacus: Legends actively wants you to lose so that you’ll spend more time in its world, obsessively getting better at it and spending more money on it as you sink even more time into it and then spend more money which encourages you to spend more time so that you spend more money etc. etc. etc.

No more than meets the eye...

Of course, one thing that must be held in consideration here, given the game’s title and licensing, is the fact that it is supposed to be an adaptation of or sequel or reboot or...

Fuck it, it’s made for fans of the Spartacus show.   So how does it stack up there?

Well, from the show it has borrowed an aesthetic that is so lazily and blandly copied from 300 that it feels a good deal like a child in the backseat of a car, mimicking everything that daddy says and doing a terrible job of it.  For the show, the saving graces were gratuitous violence, even more gratuitous sex and most of all intriguing, engaging character development that reeled the viewer into the fascinating downward spiral of rage and revenge that befalls the major characters as they start out peasants and simple gladiators and become revolutionaries.

Well, the game has the violence, and fortunately enough it hasn’t attempted to include the sex, and we’ve already covered how the game seeks to make the player systematically disinterested in the characters they control, so what we’re left with is a hollow, soulless narrative shell with the skin of a 300 ripoff and a boring red-and-tan color palette.

300 managed to get away with this by telling a wonderful visual story, but even worse than the show after which it is named, Spartacus: Legends fails to grasp visual storytelling or even interesting visuals.

The gladiators, their armor and their weapons are all more or less directly ripped from the show or from source material so similar that the distinction is unimportant, and this makes for an unfortunately boring spectacle when the gladiators clash.  This could be saved by interesting arenas, but here also the game falls short.  Arenas are also ripped from the show and what’s more, poorly rendered, with wooden crowds that seem like what would’ve happened if the guys who made the crowds in Madden 2007 tried to do Rome instead of Giants Stadium.

Furthermore, the menus (of which there are an unfortunate plenty) all manage the significant task of completely not resembling one another in form or function.  In a better game, this could maybe make for an interesting visual variety, but even with so much variety everything in this game and the menus in which the player must spend so much time is simply boring from a gameplay perspective and a visual perspective.

Astoundingly, the game even manages to screw up the camera.  At least once every hour or two, the camera would catch on a piece of scenery and I was left completely blind to the fight itself.  I might reiterate that a camera in a fighting game like this should quite literally be the least complicated camera in any type of video game, but even the simple task of providing a clear 2-dimensional plane on which fighting happens is beyond the capacity of this game at times.

Adding a nail into an otherwise ambiguous coffin, the game sounds terrible.  All of the music is retread from the credit sequence of the show and it simply sounds terrible, but you’ll hear it every single time you enter the main menu whether you’d like to or not.  Sound effects in the fights themselves are decent most of the time, but death animations and post-fight wrap-up sequences are packed with bombastic, overblown and ridiculous gushing, screaming clips that bring down the presentation level of the game significantly.

Furthermore, there is a voice, and I actually do mean a voice, that will shout things out during a fight and announce victory or defeat at the end.  I’m not sure if the voice actually is Liam McIntyre or just a guy who sounds like him, but whoever he is the lines he delivers are as poorly given as they are written.  Several times in a single fight you’ll hear the tremendous, annoying voice shout out some vaguely encouraging or incredulous overblown idiocy, and after two or three fights they begin incessantly repeating.  This wouldn’t be such an issue if it wasn’t so constant, but it’s always there so it’s always an issue.

Furthermore, this kind of development would be thematically appropriate, since essentially every iteration of the story of Spartacus from which the game draws its name has sought to emphasize that through effort, devotion and determination even the smallest of men can forge himself into a legend.  Hell, if you were to write a consummate thesis for every retelling of Spartacus’ story, that would probably be it.

The Verdict: Thumbs Down

Spartacus: Legends is free.  Its gameplay does work well when it works, and there are some (poorly implemented) good ideas here.  However, the game is so shamelessly determined to take your money and your time that it seems to stumble over its own feet on the way to the bank and bring the whole experience of the game crashing down with it.  Yes, it’s free, but your time would be better spent re-treading something else in your collection or going out for a nice walk.