Gladiator Guild Manager Gameplay Preview

Gladiator Guild Manager is a management sim for running a guild of gladiators as the title suggests. It’s a pretty light sim with a surprising narrative layer that has a bit of depth to it.

The game’s presentation feels pretty similar to a mobile game. You have three different areas available on the map at the start of the game. Your headquarters is where you unlock and upgrade your buildings. Unlocking new buildings will unlock new gladiator types for hire and upgrading your buildings will upgrade the units, usually by increasing their inventory space. The inventory space is crucial because it lets you equip more stat boosting items.

There is also an arena where you can participate in random fights to earn money. They change up the rules for each fight so a little bit of strategy is required. For example, one fight in the arena may require you to send in one strong gladiator to fight many weak ones. Choosing a tank that doesn’t deal damage would not work so well in that situation.

The other building is the main gladiator contest. It is an event that comes around at the end of every month. You participate in a series of fights. You can choose one of three difficulties before sending in your troops. The harder fights give you more rewards, which usually include money and crafting materials used to upgrade your guild buildings.

In between fights, you can visit the gladiator market to hire new troops or visit the item shop to equip your gladiators with better gear. You can also buy consumables to give them a temporary boost of sorts. The actual fights are all automatic. You only worry about which units to use and where to place them on the map.

On top of this are random events. These are pretty neat. They are all voice acted and humorous. Each event also impacts your standings with different factions. You have the peasants, the baroness, and the necromancer to deal with. Sometimes they will give you jobs that will directly impact other factions. Rejecting the job will also lower your standing with the job giver so you have to pick and choose to try and maintain a good relationship with each faction. It adds a nice layer of depth in terms of game play as well as narrative structure.

Overall, Gladiator Guild Manager is a pretty ok management sim. It doesn’t have a lot of depth to begin with but the faction system gives the game play a bit more dimension as well as create a loose narrative structure.