Today’s Spotlight is Blackthorn Arena, a gladiator management sim and tactical RPG by PersonaeGame Studio and CreativeForge Games.
You are the owner of the illustrious Blackthorn Arena, one of the largest gladiator pits in the Freelands. Buy and sell slaves from various humanoid fantasy races, and train them to become champion gladiators.
Improve your gladiators with hundreds of skills, pieces of armor, and weapons before sending them to the pit. Fight team battles, duels, and other modes with various modifiers; including traps, powerful monsters, and beasts captured from the wild.
You can find a trailer for the game below.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oqc76TsirNw
Blackthorn Arena is available on Windows PC via Steam for $19.99.
You can find a rundown of the game (via Steam) below:
core Gameplay
1) Assemble Your gladiators
Buy slaves and train them into gladiators. You will need to manage their attributes, skills, talents, and equip them with the best armors and weapons you can afford. Some of them may exhibit the capacity to become auxiliaries for your crew, such as cooks, healers, drillmasters, blacksmiths, etc.
2) Claim Your Glory
Send your Gladiators to fight in more than 10 diverse arenas or dispatch them to all kinds of exploration and plunder in the Freelands. Defeat other gladiators and over 30 kinds of monsters. Challenge the champions of other arenas and take over their positions. Create your champions and become the most powerful arena master in the world.
3) Manage Your Arena
Don’t forget you have an arena to manage! As your gladiators win battles in other arenas, you will gain money as a reward, as well as reputation. Money can buy new slaves, better equipment, and upgrades for your establishment when needed. Use your money wisely because everything in running an arena depends on it. Reputation is important too, as having a high degree of it when holding a game will grant you considerable income.
key Features
1) All gladiators Are Living People
All gladiators exist dynamically in the game’s world – not just the ones affiliated with you, but also the gladiators in other Arenas or ones who belong to other masters. NPC gladiators will enroll in different competitions held all over the world every day. They could die, get injured, or grow stronger, just as your gladiators do. Whenever you defeat other gladiators, you can either spare their lives or execute them. If you spare gladiators, you may face them again in future clashes.
2) Rpg Character Development
Blackthorn Arena offers players a cRPG character development system. Choose between 6 major attributes,6 weapon types, 8 unique genres, and combine over 100 combat skills to build a unique fighter. There are no classes, so you create your own! Your fighters will also gain various traits during their gladiatorial career. Some of them may have a strong impact on competitions.
3) Diverse Equipment
Equip your gladiators with over 200 pieces of armor and weapons, not just for combat effectiveness but also for the aesthetic! Each set of armor has a unique appearance and will be reflected in the game’s advanced avatar system. At the same time, legendary quality weapons and gears are waiting for players to explore and obtain.
4) Abundant Events and Side Missions
As an arena master, you must deal with several events every day. Some of them may be opportunities while others spell disaster. Thus dealing with all kinds of emergencies also becomes an important and inevitable experience of taking charge in an arena. Meanwhile, there are a large number of side missions in the game. Players can trigger them and send gladiators to participate in the missions such as robbery of caravans, exploration of dungeons, beast hunting, and many other kinds of quests!
5) Hold Your Venationes! (beast Show)
Players can dispatch gladiators to various exploration areas, discover, defeat or capture powerful and rare fantasy creatures, and put them into their arena, as the finale of hosting Venationes.
6) A Variety Of Different Arena Rules
Players can dispatch gladiators to various exploration areas, discover, defeat or capture powerful and rare fantasy creatures, and put them into their arena, as the finale of hosting Venationes.
7) Strong Opponents and Challengers
Powerful opponents from all different arenas will come to challenge the players’ arena at any time! To defend your glory, or to judge the situation to save your strength? Making correct and appropriate judgments is a necessary ability as a qualified arena master.
8) Real-time Combat With A Tactical Pause
The game’s combat is based on real-time, but you can pause it at any moment to issue a command, switch between characters, or apply several other actions.
9) Customizable combat AI and switchable battle mode
During fights, you can command only one gladiator at a time. The rest of them will fight automatically. But you can always edit your gladiators’ combat AI so that they respond to different situations as you see fit. Besides, the player could switch between automatic combat or manual combat anytime during the fight.
10) Brutal and Challenging gladiator Career
The career of a gladiator is cruel and gory. Your gladiators could for example completely lose control of themselves due to shattered morale during the battles. And ultimately, be aware that your gladiators may die permanently when they are defeated! So do cherish their lives, but don’t get overly attached to them.
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