Playstation 2 - Colosseum: Road to Freedom

Format
Playstation 2
Publisher
Koei
Developer
Ertain
Country of origin
Japan
Genre
Scrolling Fighter

Colosseum: Road to Freedom

By David Rasmussen
14th Aug 05

Do you suffer from insomnia? Does sleep seem to avoid you, much like good movie scripts avoids Steven Seagal? Do you wish there was some way to get a good night’s sleep that does not involve popping sleeping pills on a nightly basis? Well I have a cure for you!

Fresh from the gaming minds of a third party company employed by the people of Koei (yeah, I know, I’ve said TOEI for weeks now -- I’ve confused them with a toy company for sometime haven’t I) who have made Romance of the Three Kingdoms (X), Kessan (III), Dynasty Warriors (V) and whatever else you can think of that is based around feudal Japan slash China comes the cure for the common sleeping ailment, Colosseum : Road to Freedom! Koei should have known better then if they weren‘t the ones making it!

Take this along with the GameCube’s Digimon World 4 and you should be sleeping like a baby!
Yeah, BANDAI, it’s BORING!! I don’t know what you were thinking but I never want to see that game ever again, not in my lifetime… please, more RPGs like the (dot)hack Quadrilogy, thanks.

And speaking of boring how about an endless dull of gladiator life for a game‘s premise?
What? Gladiators are cool aren‘t they? Yeah, if you consider games like Shadow of Rome where the blood flowed like rivers in the colosseum, and the death was a beautiful canvas of red painted with a sharp blade, then yeah gladiator games are cool… but this is NOT Shadow of Rome -- which is good since I can’t take another pretty blonde boy Raiden style stealth mission, that sucked.
And yes, the world of ancient Rome has been receiving abit more in the terms of games recently since Russell Crowe did the roman bit years ago in Gladiator… though I don’t think it’s a epidemic as some game review sites/shows would like you to think since it’s not like they’re chucking out a new roman gladiator game every two months, so while you could say the movie Gladiator might have breathed a little life into the invention wheel of game making (contributing to the games coming out now), it can’t all the blame for the games were seeing coming out these days.

But I digress, it’s not like everything Russell Crowe did is responsible for a surge in games.
If that was true we should see a ton of sailing ship combat sims after Master & Commander, and lots of mini games where you try to hit obnoxious hotel clerks with telephones after… you know.
Anyway back to Colosseum. Sure this game is more accurate in a sense (the violence is not bloody to the max as Shadow of Rome), and Colosseum tries to have more strategy than the hack/slash bloodfest that was Shadow of Rome, but it could have done much better. This game, which is nothing more than a long boring tedium of gladiator training and arena battles, just drags on and on and on and on… you get the point.
In fact it’s the game’s attempts to be more than a mere hack/slash that contributes to the sheer boredom of the game in the first place!

First off when the game starts you take -- a job interview? Yeah, apparently you’ll be given that all important slavery interview just so they know what kind of slave you’ll be in this game. Somehow I think the choices are supposed to say how the story goes but I didn’t shake the game down enough times to see if there’s any differences in the choices you make. I guess there is a difference since you’re supposed to be able to unlock the option to “hail” from either Athens (Greek) or Rome (Roman) if you beat the game once and start again from the beginning, but then again I didn’t play long enough to find out.

Anyway once you complete your “interview” you are then thrust into slavery in a small backwater Roman town, where you are bought by a major Roman gladiator trainer who brings you to his “camp” where you’ll train to be a gladiator for the rest of the game. There you’ll stay, until once you earned enough money in the arena, then you’ll be able to earn your freedom. Yeah. Good luck.

In the camp you train, which is just a long series of button pushing mini games to earn points… yeah, right, button pushing mini games. Of course this is important since it builds up your abilities, and it earns you food points which is also important. Food points? Well, the better you are at these mini games the more you’ll earn, which in turns is the stuff you need to increase your skills (you’ll see once you start playing).
You also have many skills in battle (put into the form of tablets that you can arm), but sadly this game can easily be surpassed just by learning the old “skill” of “run in circles and beat the square button (or maybe the circle button which works just as well) until something dies”-- almost. More on that below. Then again maybe you’d like to skip a arena day, that you can do. If you don’t think you can take an arena battle that day you can “sleep in”, which gives you more chances to do the workouts to level up your skills.

Back to the skills and running around in circles thing. One twist is that you have to keep an eye on your stamina meter. That meter on your upper left is NOT a health meter, that is determined by the image of what looks like a bird thing (once it turns red then starts flashing your in trouble), the green bar is your stamina.
As long as it’s high you can deliver a heavy smackdown, but once it’s depleted any attempt to attack will leave you winded (and open to counterattack). So basically you rush in and start thrashing away until you are nearly out, then back off and find a spot to stand still (so it recharges), then repeat.
There is some strategy in this (concerning enemies with shields and animals) but for the most part the same tactic of attack/rest/attack/rest should do you good each and every time, so much for “strategy”.

Battles are abit varied, from team combat to survival to duels and animal battles and custom events in the Colosseum, but there just isn’t enough variety in it to really make a big difference. Also the fighting isn’t as rich, detailed, and downright beautiful to behold like the gladiator combat in Shadow of Rome, which was a blood soaked tableau of beauty (even in it’s goriest moments).

Yes, Colosseum is supposed to be more real (and not just be another hack/slash) and feature abit of strategy to it, but that is quickly overcome by the fact you can beat just about anything if you have good enough weapons, and can run in circles and whack buttons when you find an opening. Just make sure you don’t get boxed in by enemies, and always play keep away from time to time to recharge the old stamina meter, and you’ll do fine. In comparison the hack/slash bloodfest of Shadow of Rome is more interesting than this, which gets old real real fast and becomes something more tedious than entertaining to play.
And, lest we forget, this game does NOT take advantage of the arena’s “audience” (which seems to be a rather awkwardly done animation of a “audience” that somebody borrowed from the Madden NFL games) since there’s no “crowd pleaser” move to play to the audience to them them fired up, ala Shadow of Rome.

This is, by the way, how you earn your freedom so that is another minus mark against this game.
Each battle earns you money which is put against your debt to your owner (to the sum of a million coins, which is only just abit lower than the debt you own that no good raccoon Tom Nook in Animal Crossing -- only Tom Nook doesn’t expect you to kill for your “freedom”) and this is the only way you’ll make that money so get used to combat. Yeah. Good luck. It’s a hardship to earn creds, and to knock down a million coin debt is nothing to sneeze at! Worse is the fact there’s supposed to be some sort of stupid “50 day” or “80 day” cutoff point where the game ends while your in the middle of “saving” for your freedom!
How sucky is that anyway?!?

The story is nonexistent, and what story the game has seems to cripple the game by making it shorter than it should be (which is not a good thing in my book). Somehow I think this game could have had longer hours of gameplay if it wasn’t for the so called “story” of Colosseum. Also the story seems to “spurt” along in jolts and splatters, with gameplay going on for abit without even one bit of storyline, only for a burst of storyline to suddenly appear out of nowhere before another lull of non storyline geared gameplay plays out. I don’t know about you but that does not seem like a good thing to me.

As for the paths this game can take? There are two paths and one “non path” in this game.
One is the path of survival, one path is the path of destiny… and the one non-path is one in which you let the game itself chose your path for you. I did the third when I reviewed this game, so I had no idea what “path” I took… but I do know one thing, the path I took had occasional bouts of “story” jabbed into it here, and there, with no uniformity or proper sense of pacing to the “storytelling”. Uh-huh. And that, as they say, is that. I grew bored of the whole setup and ended the review early on account of boredom.

For a company like Koei, that makes games that sells like hotcakes smothered in smack, they sure didn’t do much to make this one very -- well -- intense. Yeah, technically it’s NOT their fault since Colosseum is a third party game and all, but they should have done better nevertheless. Maybe send it back and say “It could have been better”… and it could have been better, just so we’re clear on that point.
Sadly I don’t think there is much else to say about this game… really… I think I said all there is to be said about this game… oh, one more thing. You’re supposed to be able to meet famous gladiators, yeah. Didn’t give a heck about that since I didn‘t care about the “story“ in the first place, so forget about me caring about trying to figure out which of the gladiators I met were “Famous“. OK. Nuff said. Breakdown time.

Colosseum the Breakdown
What’s Hot?
What could have been hot is this game taking off and becoming a gladiator sim with some bite.
However the attempt to make the game a cut above the standard hack/slash drives it down and makes it a less than interesting mediocre hack/slash, with combat that could have just been that much better.
At best this game is a mildly amusing rental that’ll have you challenged for about a few days, maybe a week, before the tedium of the gameplay sets in and you are returning it back to the store whence you got it.

What’s Not?
While the combat is abit interesting, and it should hold your attention for awhile, it’s not perfect.
The combat should have been more fun, and require more of a challenge mode to give you something to sink your teeth into. Let’s face it, the game TRIES to teach you all these combos and stuff, but in reality you only really need to learn how to manage your stamina meter, and then you simply button mash your way through the game once you got that down pat. And sure, while I liked some aspects of the game there is more that I have complaints over than I have compliments concerning. The story, the simplistic combat that is supposed to be deeper, but falls short since there’s no incentive to do complex combos when a simple button mashing technique will do you fine time and time again.
This game just could have been better, period, and in fact it should have been better for what it cost.

Moments to Remember?
The only memorable thing is the fighting. So fight on, you gladiator gaming fan(atic), fight on!

What to Ignore?
The thing about Colosseum to ignore is the story, or lack of story thereof. The so called story just spurts and sputters along in bursts of cut scenes, not really connecting to the gamer at all and mostly just filling space if nothing else since the story is just not really motivating in any sense.
Lots of hack and slash combat, lots of training, and then spurts of story here and there doesn’t make for a well rounded game if you ask me. So guess what, you can pretty much ignore that since the story could have been more uniform and got the player more involved in the game than the few spurts of story that filled in the blanks here and there, and not much else.

Overall?
This just isn’t a good game. It tries to be something more than a hack/slash like Shadow of Rome, and it doesn’t even deliver that much. The story is not very compelling, the action could have been better, and it could have given you reason to learn those combos and to put them to good use, and it overall could have just been a more interesting game.
However, as it stands, Colosseum : Road to Freedom is nothing more than a rental to pass a week, nothing more and nothing less than that. If you rent it, and you like it? Then by all means buy it if it floats your ancient roman boat. However I think you could do better, much much better, than this game.

-- David Rasmussen 14th Aug 05

Playstation 2 Colosseum: Road to Freedom Images