PC (Microsoft Windows)2022

Gladihaters

A cyberpunk strategy/fighting game in 2D pixel art. Manage the prison, control the fighters using only commands, maximize your profit. Your goal is to win the Prison-Arena of the Year Award in only 365 days. Filled with references to a dystopian state, future technology and dark historical humor.

Trailers

Screenshots

8 user reviews

4 Steam reviews

Review History

Reviews

4 total

≥h

Steam User 6968STEAMNot recommended

Concept is neat but the game is half functional. It also refuses to close for some reason?

Jun 30, 2024·3·Verified·Early Access

Steam User 3710STEAMNot recommended

I wanted to play this game so bad for ages, but i was super broke and didn't really have the income to buy games. so when i softlocked the tutorial twice and had seemingly no control over the fight once it started i was gutted, I thought "there's controller prompts on screen i'll plug in my controller" which then proceeded to do nothing and just move my mouse around rather than control the game. I'm genuinely so upset that this game is unplayable and has been visibly abandoned.

DO NOT BUY

Oct 5, 2023·2·Verified·Early Access

Steam User 9414STEAMRecommended

It's good and it can be pretty great, but it has quite a bit to go, as I have encountered many issues. Funny enough, most of the issues were not annoying or something that would ruin the experience, but they are game breaking, even if I found it to be fun, though I expect it to be fixed.

Right now, starting out made no sense to me as to how you are supposed to overcome the AI opponents at the start, as you cannot initially directly control your character (and even when you get an upgrade to do that, it doesn't work right for now), so I was losing constantly because my character would never fight good enough, even with my inputs for what to do. This is how I accidentally found one game breaking issue, which allowed me to earn practically unlimited money by taunting the opponents when I get on top of their heads or they get on mine, because then the AI gets confused and is trying to walk back and forth, trying to attack each other, so by telling your character to taunt in this situation, you can earn unlimited amounts of money from crowd bonuses. And that is how I managed to go from losing every single match to winning every single one, by buying upgrades that allowed my characters to actually do something.
So I had unintentional fun with the bugs, it was good. Nothing to complain about much as it's Early Access, I am sure this and many other issues will still be fixed.

Besides all that, the price feels just right to me at its current state (I bought at 50% off, so even more so with a discount) and, hopefully, it will only get better. The soundtrack is pretty good, especially the main theme. It is fun, although mostly right now I only experienced unintended way of having fun. I think something might not be right with the combat at the start, given how I could not win anything until I found an exploit. I can't really say what's wrong though at this moment. Of course, I am not suggesting things to be made easy, but I just felt like I was going to be in an endless loop of losing with nothing to do against it, as somehow initially the enemy AI just always overcomes your AI, until you manage to somehow get upgrades (without exploits?).

I really enjoyed the voice acting and the phrases for each Gladihater, which fit well with the whole context. I hope there will be more characters with more epic phrases in the future and maybe not just for the Gladihaters during fights.

I feel like this review is not very coherent, but I guess neither was my experience. But I am interested in how will this game progress and it upsets me that it seems to have close to no attention to it at this moment, so I can only hope I can contribute to helping with that a little, as the game can truly be fun when it gets patched up a bit and expanded.

[h1]EDIT 2024-06-29[/h1]
I think the game is abandoned. Even so, I have seen it go on sale for 99 cents, so frankly it is worth that – there is fun to be had here even if the game is not finished and never will be.

99 cents worth of fun – definitely.
Full price (given that it will likely never be finished) – I don't think so.
Something in between – maybe yes, if you think you are really intrigued by what you see here, but I would not at this point.