Blackthorn Arena

TL:DR? The real time with pause controls, UI, gladiator management, fights, and the game mechanics are all pretty bad. I could spend an hour explaining why. Just take my word for it. No? You actually want some reasons? Okay, then this won't be as short as I promised. Here's the NTL:HTR (not too long:happy to read). Gladiators will step on obvious traps or hazards in the arena even after you tell them to move somewhere else. Once they engage with an enemy they will sometimes circle toward a hazard and step on it. Why? I have no idea. The enemy isn't making them move that way, they're just moving left and right. They have loads of room to move back, the opposite direction, or both. They were told not to fight near the hazard anyway (by repeated pausing and clicking elsewhere) but they will sometimes ignore that and just go step on the buzz saw thing anyway. It gets worse. After you WIN and decide whether to let the enemy live or not (the usual thumb up/down garbage that most gladiator games get wrong) your character will *STILL* step onto the traps and hazards, and at that point you have zero control of them. Fun, right? Wrong - that is not my definition of fun. It gets worse - some abilities let you knock enemies back or down which is great, right? Well, just TRY to get one of those abilities to knock an enemy into a spike or buzz saw or other hazard. Your gladiators willingly step on this stuff when you actively try to prevent them from doing that but it's nigh impossible to make an enemy take hazard damage when you're actively trying to do it and employing abilities. Wait, there's more! Playing in turn based mode is an option so you can better control where your gladiators move from turn to turn but it was tacked on far too late and barely functions. It was an afterthought and should have been added on day one. This honestly should not have been a real time with pause game. Anyway, because the turn based mode tries to use most of the same mechanics it just doesn't work very well and isn't fun. A game has to be designed from the start to incorporate both because the mechanics need to change a lot (unless they're very, very well designed). Enemy levels and equipment, plus skill levels, seem to mean very little. I had one enemy completely demolish several of my gladiators even though every member of my team had better training, were higher level, had more skills, and possessed far better gear. There's some RNG involved in the fights but someone who's completely outmatched shouldn't be ripping through several gladiators in a row. I can understand getting some lucky rolls and beating maybe one and maybe holding their own against the second one, but they probably should not be dominating several gladiators in a row, especially when stamina and fatigue play into things. I ended up barely winning that fight but the last gladiator I had managed to just barely win even though the enemy was tired and injured already. No clue why, the gladiators I sent in had been doing very well against similar opponents that were tougher than this one. The training, blacksmithing, cooking, motivation (it's basically physically correcting your gladiators to make them behave but I just don't want to say the word they used in the game for it), and medical options are really limited and nearly everything requires research. Lots of things make no sense here - for example even a fairly high level cook won't know basic recipes until unlocked through research. What did they learn to cook before? Just cook that, maybe? Nonsense.... and it gets worse. Your characters become unhappy and there's a "magic potion" to increase their happiness. You can't treat them well, avoid punishing them, provide better sleeping quarters and food, etc. to make them happy. Nope. Magic potions., Ridiculous. Weapon and gear quality, costs, weights, and even the naming conventions just make little sense to me. The game mechanics just seem slapped together and don't really work all that well. The upgrade system for skills and classes isn't terrible but it's clunky and could be much better. There are some skills that are nearly useless and some that are incredibly good. There seems to be very poor balancing of combat mechanics and skills and I think the whole system needs a balancing pass, or a complete overhaul. This game is 22+ gigabytes and I don't know why. There does not seem to be all that much content and the graphics certainly aren't of such high quality that this game should eat up that much storage space. Price point? Well, this seems relatively fair considering what this game is right now, and it's often on sale for under 10 USD. Can't really complain about that even if the game's not that good. Overall this game feels like a very amateur attempt and they're trying to make something that's quite complicated. If that's what it is then it's a rather good start, and great first effort because games are not easy to make, but it needs a huge amount of work to get where I think it needs to be. I hope the developer continues to polish this game, and really works hard on fixing the turn based mode because I think that's where this game could really shine if it was done properly. The honest truth is that in its current state I cannot recommend it. Pick it up if you want to support the developer, or if you know what you're getting and understand this game has a lot of flaws, otherwise give it some more time and maybe, just maybe, this will be a great gladiator management game.