Mortal Glory 2 is a roguelite tactical RPG in a gladiator setting. It's very directly influenced by Slay the Spire having a nearly identical map set up, but with combat being a grid-based tactical affair involving teams of (usually) up to 4 gladiators.

The execution here is solid. Buffs and debuffs are meaningful and useful. Knockback is a central mechanic. There's plenty of field effects. Your gladiators can be a variety of races, each giving an active ability that doesn't cost a turn to use. These are mostly fairly powerful, so they do enough to differentiate the races. Each unit can learn up 4 abilities on top of this, and freely increase their strength, agility, wisdom, and vitality. There's no classes, so you can end up having things like a tanky self-healing troll focused on summoning magic.

I've played 2 runs so far with a play time of 8 hours. I take my time in strategy games, but those are some chunky runs. Without pumping up difficulty settings, I've not found the game that hard so far, but I can imagine defeat will be frustrating if that's the result after 3 hours in a run. On the other hand, the long runs give a lot of time to develop and enjoy your team of gladiators.

It's a very low budget indie game and the presentation reflects that fact. Everything is perfectly readable, though, so the simple graphics and sounds didn't really have a negative impact on my enjoyment. I believe it uses some music packs I've heard elsewhere, but they're appropriate for the game, so that's not a big deal to me.

Overall, I'd say it's a good package and nicely scratches the tactical RPG itch without asking for 80 hours of your time. Definitely worth checking out if that's something that appeals to you.

Reviewed on Mar 16, 2024


Comments