Colosseum: Road To Freedom

Road to hell, more like...

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At my signal, unleash hell. A dastardly PC point-and-click role-play game has managed to sneak into the imperial court of the Playstation 2 console. The graphics would shame the Playstation one, the dialogue is anachronistic [American sayings creeping into discussions between men and their captors long before dear old Christopher Columbus set sail] and the "training levels" are mind numbing to the extreme. The hidden offender is arrogant, audacious and aggressive. One false move and he shall bite. Remove his cloak and we see the face behind the mask. The emissary of the guilty is none other than 'Colosseum'.

Who would have thought that being sold into slavery would turn out to be so dull? The experience of captivity inspiring even more ennui as badly sketched cartoon characters of Roman officials talk down to you - the lead character in the game - as a Daily Mail aficionado might greet an asylum seeker. Should you defeat your enemies- and indeed, at times, your friends also - you must be ready to take further risks. Scurry along the dirt floor like a feeding rodent. You're looking for pieces of stone tablet, which have dropped from your victim's hands. If you can pick up these pieces, you can decipher a mystery nobody cares about and discover a truth nobody wanted to uncover.

At the beginning of the game, you must fight or die. You win simply by stabbing your opponent more times than he stabs you. Next, in a rare moment of gaming lunacy, you are introduced to the tutorial levels or "training levels" where you are taught how to fight like a gladiator, making the previous couple of fights a complete waste of time and energy. One would have appreciated a 'Street Fighter' or 'Mortal Kombat moment' element to the 'Vs' proceedings. I would have given the Earth for two expertly sketched and graphically enhanced gladiators set across from one another in the arena, restrained but poised to duel to the death. Instead, I was disappointed. Out come two miniature clay model men clasping shields to their chests, a thin stick of silver included in the arsenal in a pathetic attempt to appease those who hungered for the appearance of a sword.

Controlling your Gladiator is not a pleasant process in the realm of Colosseum. You can easily make your pawn in the field echo modern students everywhere and sleep until noon the following day. But beyond that it is very difficult to manoeuvre your character around the maze of environments that suddenly presents itself to the player upon completion of the training levels. The addition of the "gather funds and purchase weapons" motif to the game makes playing Colosseum irritating as well as boring. When you switch on that console in the corner and marvel at the chaste, beguiling graphics on screen, one wishes to escape the confines of reality and enjoy the fantasy. Having to worry about money and how you purchase weakly forces the game into the mould of lifestyle television programmes on the BBC. Any moment, one expects Lorne Spicer to spring from the screen and berate you for not "money-spinning" enough to keep the family total up this month and still have enough change left over to purchase those pesky weapons.

Colosseum fails to challenge the player. Despite the premise of fighting tooth and nail for your life and- ultimately - your freedom, the player does not feel the slightest bit in danger. There's no threat to drive the player to succeed and no prospect of entertainment from a game that is badly thought out, poorly sketched in a graphic context and is - quite simply - wasteful. It wastes opportunities, it wastes the talents of its creators and - above all - it wastes your time.

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By Martin Drury