Gladiators IDLE

Gladiators IDLE intends to be a quick an easy achievement game, and on that account it succeeds. But in every other respect, it's a confusing mess. Unless you collect quick completions, there are better far better idling games on steam.

Since Gladiators is an aspiring game developer's early work, it's perfectly understandable that it's rough around the edges. Props are due for its hand-made pixel art and compact design. But unfortunately that's where it ends. The game does nothing to ease you into its mechanics, explaining how gladiators work or what the purpose of training stats serve. The prestige/rank system is entirely opaque. You have access to hundreds of buyable fighters, but can easily find yourself lost within them, leaving you clicking furiously through menus to get back to one you can afford.

Then, too, there's the actual arena. The idle on/off option doesn't appear to make any difference, as there's nothing for you to actually do during a fight manually. Fighters can be left to train, you can buy armor, and you can... pay to work? None of these functions make sense, since there's no way to see what stat upgrades they grant, or what overarching purpose they serve.

If you want examples of great idle games, check out Free ones like NGU idle and the FPS-lite Time Clickers. This one needs much more work.

Achievement Hunters: Buy the first fighter, then fight the lowest level arena match for gold. Use that gold to then buy the best fighter you can, rinse and repeat. To accelerate the process, you can spend your TP on crit, but you'll have to mess around with the level of the enemy to match your fighter's strength, since it isn't clear what rank you can survive based on your stats. Whatever you choose, the achievements are primarily passive, granted for rank and total gold. <1hr to 100%

Thank you F.S. maaa for the donation.

4/10!

Easy little game. It doesn't take long to get all the achievements.

Yet again, DIG Games and Pixelabor have copy + pasted yet another 2D retro pixelcrap idler/incrementer... this is from Pixelabors catalog of dozens of reskins/rearrangements of the exact same incrementer formula... a small, fake game with no value whatsoever for gamers. They've now got around two dozen of these fake copy + pastes of the same general incrementer/idler format game on Steam, rearranged, reskinned, but basically the same thing, with woefully bad quality. Not made as a genuine game for gamers, but as a Steam cash grab, trying to scam gamers out of money for nothing.

DIG Games have shown a repeat pattern of unethically dumping other people's work onto Steam as a cheap, nasty cash grab. Here's some examples so you can see for yourself:

• "Death Moon" = 2D Game Kit
• "ReBall" = BallX - Infinite Brick Breaker - Complete Game Template
• "ZAP Master" = Battle Zap
• "HopHeaders" = Bighead Run Run
• "Hot Roads" = Biker Stars Racer Gold Edition
• "Abst Clicker Farm" = Bit Clicking Engine
• "Yabgits: Haunted Cemetery" = Block Breaker Template
• "Color Ball" = Color Blast 3D Source Code
• "Color Flash" = ColorBattle Complete Unity Game
• "Driftence" = Extreme Drift
• "Garden Magic" = Farm Link Complete Game
• "Go Rocket" = Free Space Shooter
• "Gamma Space" = GMSAsteroids
• "Lack of Water" = Happy Glass Source Code
• "GraveRunners" = Infinite Runner Engine 3D
• "Worm in horror place" = Island Challenge Game
• "Puzzlection" = Jigsaw
• "Monkey Hit" = Kong Hero – Platformer Complete Game Template
• "Candy Mandy" = Match 3 Jelly Garden Kit
• "iMemo" = Memory Game Starter Kit
• "ChicScape" = Mobile Tools + Complete Game (Jumpy)

Taking this shovelware seriously as if it was a genuine attempt to make a game, it doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.

The amateur pixelcrap visual presentation here at best could have been an attempt to use "retro" as a crutch, a weak excuse to avoid admitting the developer wasn't capable of doing the job of a game developer this decade and creating cutting edge, high quality 3D visuals. While a lack of skill or funding is the explanation for this failure, it's no excuse. The end result of this incompetence is a game that looks dramatically inferior to professionally developed games. Terraria and Undertale succeeded despite looking crap, not because they look crap.

Some of the defects in the game can be attributed to the choice of using the Construct 2/Construct 3 game engine/toolset. This is a very poor quality toolset sometimes used by amateur developers as it doesn't require advanced game development skills, but unfortunately has very limited capabilities (it's worse than GameMaker Studio!). Just as you can't make a silk purse out of a sows ear, you can't make a great video game if you use a terrible engine.

The very poor quality of this game puts it squarely on-par with ancient 1990's Flash/Java games, and given it's 2026 (and this was released not so far back in 2020), gamers and the industry expect and deserve better than this kind of low effort shovelware.

The poor quality of this game is reflected by how many people spent time with it. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the all-time peak player number was only 3 players, and the worst part is these weren't genuine players, these were the Russian fake review accounts that the developer paid to make the fake reviews. Since the fake reviews are all done, now the only player activity occurs once or twice a month, presumably someone loading it up to see what it is then quickly uninstalling it. Considering there's over 130 million gamers on Steam and well over 175,000+ games for gamers to choose from, the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality game is to be expected.

Warning: Review Manipulation!

This game features a number of fake positive reviews from accounts known to be in the business of review manipulation/paid reviews. They're all written in either Russian, broken English or ChatGPT AI slop, appear at almost exactly the same time, very shortly after the game launched on Steam, all have a direct Steam purchase of the game, and the accounts are used consistently to write fake reviews for asset flips and other cash grabs/scams. The "Positive" review score on this game should be disregarded due to this blatant, unethical review manipulation. This is done to deceive and scam gamers into paying for a bad product.

Due to the 2024 FTC ruling (16 CFR § 465.4, 15 U.S.C. § 45), these fake reviews are a violation of US Federal Law.

Next is pricing and value. Is this game worth buying from among the 175,000+ games on Steam?

Gladiators IDLE is relatively cheap at $3 USD, but it's not worth it. Remember that if you buy a game from an unethical developer, you're putting your money at risk.