I’d love to say that Bloodgrounds plunged me into a crimson mist, but in practice, this arena tactics RPG with town-building feels as cosy as a pair of soft leather socci on a frosty Saturnalia. The setup: you are a gladiator from a Roman-themed fantasy world, who has recently won his freedom in the arena. How is he celebrating his freedom? By becoming a gladiator manager himself, as he continues his quest for vengeance upon the Emperor who slaughtered his father.
I guess this is the optimal Russell Crowe career path, but still, imagine if he’d hung up his sword and reinvented himself as a carpet salesman. Instead of continuing the cycle of violence that was so cruelly forced upon you, you’d have to educate clients on pile density and antistatics while politely parrying their requests to hear about the time you ripped that Scandinavian’s ears off with your toes.
People would point out that you sure have a lot of blood-red carpets in your carpet shop, har har, and you would smile delicately and consider your wine goblet and say “maroon and rose, actually”. For every query like this, another maroon or rose carpet would appear in your shop and another townsperson would mysteriously go on holiday for the rest of their lives. Anyway, I forget why I’m talking about carpets. Oh yeah, that gladiator game.
Gladiators need to win the crowd, and Bloodgrounds is very much playing the hits (5% critical chance). Its tussles take place in handsomely decked pixelart stadiums boasting such ornamental fixtures as flaming torches and crucified bodies. Your characters and enemies move around according to an initiative bar along the top. There’s a no-nonsense distinction between movement points and action points, which are used to perform regular attacks and special abilities, while consumables can be played for free.
The character classes seem both familiar and busily outfitted. There are helmeted thuggoes who can rope-dart people and stun them with a pommel; strutting retiarii equipped with throw-net and trident; archers who can set exploding traps from afar. Leering, scarred and eye-patched humans aside, you’ll dally with mythical beasties such as spectral reapers and brazen quadrotor automatons. The arenas themselves have terrain fixtures such as mounted crossbows, and yes, the audience may lob in a power-up or two if they like the cut of your gibs. Preferably, your enemy’s gibs.
Between clashes, you retire to your landscape-view villa where you can hire fresh meat and send any less than fresh meat to the infirmary. Much as in Dankest Sturgeon, you’ll add and upgrade buildings with your winnings at other arenas, scattered across a world map of escalating difficulty. Each town facility has its talking head, and I find the writing and characters quite charming so far. Your architect, for example, is a sarcastic ghost sheep who probably began life in an Ovid story somewhere. Good for him.
Bloodgrounds launches this year. Developers Exordium Games are them wot did spacey shmup Last Encounter and horror comedy mystery Bear With Me. It’s published by Daedalic, who seem to have a thing for Romans lately – this January, they launched 4X strategy game Yield! Fall of Rome from Billionworlds into early access.
