Right from the outset, the game gives the appearance of being promising. The introduction sequence always gives me a strong urge to play the game, no matter how much I know I’ll regret it. It bombards us with brief textual narratives that are supposedly historical (the style in which they are presented are also important for the ending sequences, but more on that later), and then it shows a brief CG movie of two gladiators dueling in The Colosseum.

The game has two basic modes: story mode and arena mode. The story mode is, as expected, a very, very weak attempt to provide some sort of justification for everything happening to you. Essentially, you’ve been made into a slave, and are barely surviving the harsh conditions of wherever this particular part of the game takes place when a gladiator trainer purchases you for a hefty sum of one million S. The game never really explains what “S” is, but for the purposes of this review we’ll just assume it means silver. Anyway, I digress. The purpose of the game is to pay back this debt of one million silver and become a free man. What this boils down to is a game that consists entirely of what MMORPG players have called gold farming.

“But hey,” you say, “surely this game has some awesome fights in The Colosseum.” Easy there, Sparky. One of the misconceptions that the title of the game, as well as the opening cinematic, seems to create is some idea that the game actually takes place in The Colosseum. To a certain extent, that is true, but maybe only one sixth of the game. The rest of the time is spent either training or fighting in lesser arenas, both of which I will get into.

First, however, I would like to discuss how the game is structured, as it is actually fairly complex. The player begins his life as a gladiator, obviously, at Day 1. Each day, there will be one of four possible events: training day, fight at an arena, going to the slave market or a story event.

Training day is, obviously, a day where the player spends time training skills, earning training points which can be spent on one of five attributes (Strength, Dexterity, Agility, Vitality, and Stamina), and exercising. Training, however, isn’t so much a test of skills, or some way of improving skills, as it is a tedious exercise in stupid little mini-games. There are three mini-games: combat training, dodge training, and exercising. In order to finish training, the player must complete two of these mini-games.

The first two, combat and dodge training, are fairly self-explanatory. Exercising, however, is quite possibly the least exciting little game I’ve ever played. Essentially, the player chooses a part of the body to exercise (feet, arms, neck, and body are the available areas), and then presses a random button that goes across the top of the screen. Meanwhile, the trainer will shout things at you like “That’s right!”, “Alright!”, “What are you DOING?”, and “YES!”. The button presses move across the top of the screen at a snail’s pace and are pretty much impossible to mess up, unless you’re attempting to do them in the hardest mode possible, although there really isn’t any incentive to do so. Exercising provides two rewards, however, that are not present in either of the other training mini-games: it makes you more resistant to attacks in that area that you’re training, and it provides you with points that can be spent on stats later. Because of this, despite exercising being extremely boring, it’s really the only training activity worth doing.

The second half of training day is the “cafeteria” part. The character (in my game, I named my gladiator Bob) goes up to the head cook and eats, which is when you spend those hard earned training points.

Generally, after each training day there will be a fight at one of two arenas: a lesser arena and The Colosseum. Most of the fighting will be spent at the lesser arena as Colosseum fights usually only take place once a week. In each fighting day, there are seven main events, which can be any combination of the following: Battle Royal, Survival, Team Battle, Duel, Mock Battle, and Hunting. Battle Royal is basically a bunch of gladiators fighting each other, whereas Survival is a bunch of gladiators fighting you. Duels pit you against one super-powerful gladiator (sort of like a boss fight), which can lead to some valuable weapons and armor. Mock Battles, which only take place in the Colosseum, attempt to re-enact ancient battles, and usually consist of the player trying to fulfill a series of objectives that are more involved than just killing everything in sight. Hunting is the only event that doesn’t involve killing humans, but rather animals like bulls and tigers.

At the end of day two, the player has gone through a day of training and a day of fighting and has participated in seven fights total, each of which are about two to four minutes each. From that day of fighting, the player has earned a grand total of roughly 7000 silver. It’s almost depressing to think that only 993,000 more silver is required. Now, to be fair, the rate in which you earn money increases with your rank (which is increased as you win fights), but it still takes around forty days to become a free man.

For a while, the fights don’t seem so bad, but then the absolutely lackluster controls and gameplay rear their ugly heads. As an example, the camera is particularly bad. Although the control of the camera is generally left to the player, often times I’ll get pushed up against a wall, or the camera will swing around some object that completely blocks the view of my character. Sure, I could just swing it somewhere, but the camera moves extremely slowly, and in the heat of battle it’s fairly distracting to have the camera block your view. When that happens, it also isn’t unusual to become surrounded.

The camera, however, is nothing compared to the targeting issues. The way the targeting system works is that it automatically makes your character focus on whoever is closest to the front of your character. This means that if you have two enemies in front of you, your target will go back and forth, and it becomes almost impossible to attack the one you actually want to hit. This is especially aggravating when one enemy has his back to your character and another one with a huge shield facing you, and your character goes straight for the enemy with the shield, rather than the vulnerable one.

To make matters worse, the fighting system itself is absolutely atrocious. There are four basic attacks: left, up, right, and down, each of which correspond to Square, Triangle, Circle, and X respectively. There are also some skills that your character can train, but they nearly all of them give pretty much the same result. The fighting doesn’t seem to be bad at first, but once you’ve participated in one of the 100+ required fights to purchase your freedom (it stops counting at 99), its mind-numbing simplicity really shows itself. To add to the dullness, with a small shield and a big weapon, you can just tap one button over and over and win pretty much every battle with relative ease.

This wouldn’t be so bad if the enemy AI was actually good, but they are so stupid to the point of being ridiculous. They have a tendency to not only just stand there and just wait for attacks to come, but also to run around and just bump into people. When they do try to attack, all they do is one move, without even attempting to dodge or parry your attacks. They just stand there and take your hits until they die, or wait for you to zone out and/or make a mistake and get in a really cheap hit. This means that, for over 100 fights, you repeatedly fight the same generic enemy that doesn’t even fight back. It’s almost as if it’s hour after hour of target practice and crappy mini-games.

The only fights that are actually entertaining in some way are the duels against special enemies in the Colosseum. Those enemies actually do things like dodging/parrying attacks, performing special movies, and attacking aggressively. Unfortunately, in the entire game, only seven of these fights exist and only open up after fifty successful fights. After defeating them, however, they can be fought again in Arena Mode (separate from Story Mode), which is pretty much just story mode without a story. So, if some person actually enjoyed fighting in mindless battles over and over, that person could skip the story and just indulge him or herself.

Another bizarre problem is how the game treats the death of your gladiator. Upon death, there are two seemingly random possibilities: paying 1000s to be healed, which causes you to lose all of your hard-earned equipment, or being resurrected for half of your money. Yes, that’s right. If you’ve been saving up the silver for a while, then death can potentially mean losing half of it. On the bright side, this possibility allows you to keep your equipment and gives you a chance to repeat the fight that killed you. If you refuse to spend half of your money to be resurrected, it doesn’t let you be healed for 1000s, it just boots you back to the title screen where you have to reload your game. It’s a pretty awful thing to happen if you’re on the last fight of the day and the enemy gets a lucky shot on you. You can either sacrifice nearly everything you earned that day or repeat it all over again.

Eventually, at around the fiftieth day, whether or not you’ve bought your freedom, the story finishes and the game ends. Depending on your choices in the game, there are five possible endings. Theoretically, the game can be beaten in the second day just by attacking guards and fighting your way out of the arena, but the best ending can only be reached by repaying the debt and defeating the final duel. After playing through the game a couple of times just to see all of the endings, I can safely say that none of those five are actually any good.

At this point, I’m desperately reaching for something positive that I can attribute to this game—something groundbreaking, original, or even in some way enjoyable. Unfortunately, Colosseum: Road to Freedom does not have a single thing going for it other of the fact that a tiny fraction of the game is spent in the Colosseum. It is boring, repetitive, and requires no thought whatsoever to complete. The fighting system, which one should expect to be polished in a game about gladiatorial combat, is quite possibly one of the worst I’ve ever experienced. If you really need to get a Colosseum fix in a video game, there are many, many better alternatives.