Your goal in Daedalic published Bloodgrounds is to expand your influence far enough to exact revenge on none other than the Emperor himself through managing your town, raising gladiators, worshipping gods and buying totally legitimate merchandise.
Ah, the life of a Gladiator: Hot sand under your feet, a refreshing beverage within reach and friends at your side — truly a perfect holiday. That is until you remember your Patronus sent you here to fight mythologically-inspired assassins, magicians, carnivores and cut-throats. Luckily for us, in Bloodgrounds we play the Patronus, a land-owner with the resources to send other people to do his dirty work.
With its sights set on marrying town management with lethal turn-based combat, what will make Bloodgrounds stand out from that one notoriously dark campaign-based dungeon game? Turns out, a fair amount…
Turn-based combat with unpredictable enemies
Bloodgrounds’ combat is both lethal and unpredictable. You’ll find no Slay the Spire or Into the Breach enemy intents floating above your bloodthirsty opponents here. Instead, opponents in the arena have 2-4 different abilities that they are free to choose from each turn. Not seeing enemy intents immediately gives the impression of an uphill fight for survival rather than a cool and collected calculation of combat. I’ve seen enemies deliberately place a shot so that the splash damage hits my sneaky assassin gladiator one side, and detonates an explosive crystal the other, causing even more damage to the rest of my combatants. Enemies don’t go easy on you or choose to use ineffective attacks. Although, it would be disingenuous to say the enemy movement AI was quite as thorough (It’s not uncommon to see a Minotaur step back and forth between two spaces to burn through movement, maybe it’s leg day?).
Your own gladiators have a similar suite of moves. Each combatant has one weapon ability (Making gear choice more than just stat-based) and three class abilities. These are learnt from a list of nine per class, so even two members of the same class can have completely different abilities and weapons, creating a different playstyle. Some abilities cost all three of your AP (action points) for the turn, such as the powerful Earthquake which pulls and damages all targets in a 3 x 6 grid. Some are only 1 AP and teleport the caster, pull a unit or apply a ground effect. With enemies using a wide range of abilities and your party having a wide range of responses, fights can be markedly multi-faceted in higher acts.
This range of ability use accounts for the unpredictability of combat, but what about the lethality? Bloodgrounds takes a pretty RNG-heavy approach to this, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing but rather reflects the dangerous nature of pitting semi-naked humans against mythological horrors beyond their comprehension. Enemies’ normal attacks are prone to kill one of your combatants in an average of five to ten hits. That’s not so bad when they mostly get only one or two attacks a turn! However, enemy critical, dodge and “lucky” chances are stacked against you. Your brave souls start with between 0 and 5% to any of these chances, while enemies exhibit anywhere between 5-25% depending on the challenge level. This means one turn of critical hits or dodges can entirely flip your strategy, and even result in gladiators attaining the ultimate reward: A glorious death beholden by the paying public.
During combat you aren’t just managing health, statuses, movement and action points. In true Gladiator fashion, you have to be entertaining. For now, that means completing Audience Objectives. Some of these are incentives to use certain abilities and consumables, while others are more specific such as using the environment for a kill. It’s a thematic way to make combat about more than just killing enemies, in fact sometimes the gold and rewards you earn from the audience are worth spending an extra couple of risky turns in the pit. The objectives do need balancing, as if you’re anything like me and you see “Take 24 Steps with Gladiator Tomas” and there’s one enemy left while you’re only on three steps, you’re going to just skip turns and run in circles. In future updates Exordium have hinted at an Audience Entertainment gauge being added, which could make quick kills more rewarding than turns where nothing happens and thus remove the unlucky drudgery of those specific audience objectives.
Town management that takes you from zero to hero
Fortunately, once all the blood and guts are done and you return home, Bloodgrounds is eager to keep you on your feet. It might love kicking you down, but it always helps get you back up. The infirmary will remove both permanent and timed debuffs for free after a mission (Unlike Darkest Dungeon needing both money and time) and you can train low-level gladiators for free without having to throw them helplessly to the arena. Later on, you can even dig up the ceremoniously buried remains of former gladiators to loot the gear that they so selfishly died whilst wearing. These mechanics all lessen the sting of defeat and make permanent progress more achievable.
Your town management screen itself is a far cry from the combat. You build up your town slowly but surely, and gold isn’t so plentiful that you max everything right away. This led to me piling all I could into the Academy and Infirmary so I could heal more of my willing subjects, and upgrade their combat skills. Another player might have prioritised the Shrine, providing passive buffs to gladiators who worship certain deities. These buffs can incentivise changing a gladiator’s skills and gear, which is always nice so players don’t feel they have to stick to whatever they started with. Someone else might have built the Dark Alley, which is able to provide sneaky sabotage items that injure and hinder enemies before fights even begin.
As you invest, animated little townsfolk begin hurrying to-and-fro about the buildings while you are menuing. The skyline becomes more defined and the city begins to resemble a base menu out of Heroes of Might and Magic. Each building is run by a specific NPC, ranging from mythological humanoids to simple handmaidens. While there’s no voice acting, the characters are written with just enough dialogue to establish their differences and personality. Your first point of contact is Bahir who, I like to imagine, should be voiced by Jesse Corti of Death Stranding fame.
With all this going on in town, you never feel sore about a loss for long. The combat screen and town screen are like two different worlds, and finding the flow between healing your veterans while training your fresh recruits makes the game click both inside the arena and out of it.
Just like Silksong, act 1 is the biggest hurdle
While all these mechanics are fleshed out by the end of Act 2, Bloodgrounds does suffer from a small pacing issue. Act 1 can be, depending on your luck, up to 4 hours of gameplay. It’s equally possible that it’s all wrapped up in an hour and a half. The RNG-heavy mechanics are mostly to blame for the rough start. Enemies taking no damage (via dodge) and no status effects (via lucky) can ruin your best laid plans. Not to mention, there’s an inconsistency with status effects in general. Fire, poison and bleed all deal minor percentage damage, we’re talking between 2-5% of HP. However, multiple stacks just increase the duration of the effect. Status effect cures only remove one level of this stack, so in reality a stack of five poison is just as incurable (and equally damaging) as a stack of 50. But, we’ve all heard the tales of Darkest Dungeon campaigns ending in week five. It’s a part of this type of experience, at least until new difficulty modes are added during Early Access.
This might push some new players away who get a few hours in and assume they’ve seen everything, when in reality they’re giving up the pick just before striking gold. If you can stick with Act 1 despite minimal upgrade and building opportunities then you are rewarded with an abundance of gold sinks, ability upgrades, and even entirely new gameplay systems in Act 2 onwards. Should some of these elements be available in Act 1 to alleviate the early-game drudgery? Perhaps. That’s something Bloodground’s time in Early Access will assess. But, honestly, in some ways the current Act 1 reminds me of old school RPGs like Gothic, in which you are hilariously outmanned and outgunned in the beginning so that your work in attaining strength and wealth is all the more rewarding.
The Bloodgrounds Early Access roadmap
Fortunately, Exordium games an on-the-ball with balancing the somewhat dramatic difference between status and damaging effects. They have already made a change to “Precision” which now increases Crit Chance to 50% instead of maxing it to 100%, making it more on-par with other such buffs. These little changes will go a long way to make Bloodgrounds 1.0 feel more consistent. Having some effects be so incremental and others so binary can make understanding the flow of combat harder for a new player, so these changes are welcome.
Once all of its systems and services are in place, Bloodgrounds is an exceptional foundation for what will hopefully become a haven for gladiatorial masochists and power-fantasy demi-gods alike. New difficulty options, crafting, audience interactions, gladiator expeditions and more are set up on the promising Early Access roadmap:
Bloodground’s Early Access presents an incredible base for a tactical, brutal and sometimes unfair delve into a mythological world. The minor grievances with ability descriptions, status effect inconsistencies and general balance are all exactly the sorts of problems an Early Access period will solve.
With equipment, gold, permanent debuffs, devotion to gods and learning abilities to manage in town plus all the status effects, grid-based movement and action economy to manage in the arena, Bloodgrounds promises to be a crunchy and substantial meal for any turn-based enthusiast. The idea of the game retaining this amount of depth but with more balance and clearer communication to the player really gives me an appetite for the final version of Bloodgrounds.
Vale, Patronus!
Bloodgrounds’ Early Access is available now on Steam
