Domina: As Dull as the Damage Inflicted by A Wooden Gladius

 Time to Beat: 4 Hours

Like many of the games reviewed by Awkward Mixture, Domina is a member of the indie explosion, available on Steam, and the first game developed and published by Dolphinbarn, released in 2017.

In Domina, the player controls a scorned lady of Rome, whose noble father has squandered the family fortune. Though destitute, she seeks to reclaim her station, her fortune, and extract vengeance upon any who impede her ascension. She acquires a ludus, purchases her first gladiators, with the plan to train them, and seek victory in the arena.

With the aid of an unsavory Legate and a desperate Magistrate, the mistress must drill her gladiators, upgrade the ludus, and win glory through the gore of her slaves.

As the player, the ludus contains a number of activities necessary to prepare for each battle. The ludus includes two gladiators at its opening; an untrained welp and a veteran of combat. To increase their garrison, the player can purchase gladiators, or earn them as a reward in the arena. I played on the preset difficulty, and I never bought a man, for every victory offered a new captive as a reward, while after each loss, the arena offered another soul to sacrifice out of pity.

In addition to their most critical attribute, health, each gladiator is composed of five skills and four traits. A gladiator's skills (agility, weapon, defense, strength, and meditate) can be improved by training, but the four traits (aggro, turtle, evasive, and stamina) describe intrinsic behaviors which are mostly beyond the player's influence.

With money, won in the arena, the player can improve their ludus with wells, improved housing, and a variety of trainers. Beyond food, gladiators need equipment to stave off their eventual demise. Equipping an entire contingent of gladiators (fifteen can fit in the ludus) with the best swords and armor, is an expense only the most successful businesswoman can afford. But the value of equipment often outweighs the effect of skill. Even the most skilled gladiator armed only with a wooden gladius, will discover the difficulty in piercing proper legion plate armor.

After a few quick days, battle is offered, and only a coward refuses. Early battles are two person affairs, but later battles can include more than a dozen men scrabbling away from death in the dust. Before each battle begins, the player is allowed to review the foe(s), and enter whichever of his gang he finds suitable. Unfortunately, Domina's interface makes reviewing the relevant information frustrating because it is not contained on one screen. Instead, there are a number of sub-screens which each contain a piece of the puzzle. Once a battle begins, Domina leaves nothing for the player to do, with the gladiators controlled by the computer (though a later technological advancement enables player control of one combatant). The results of each battle are remarkably predicable, which is fortunate since the death of a well trained investment is debilitating, but it's also oddly disappointing because it reveals something about Domina: battles aren't a numbers game, but just a short show to demonstrate how well or poorly the player has managed their resources. Careful review before each battle, comparing the opponents skill values, and selecting the proper hero is the game, but it's disappointingly simple as well. There doesn't seem to be any difficulty in selecting a victorious gladiator, as long as they are in stock. All the states, attributes, skills, traits, and abilities can be boiled down to four things: health, skill average, damage, and absorb, which makes playing the pythia as easy as being a backseat quarterback.

Though battles are vicious, vivid displays of stylized violence, they lack the ability to deliver visceral enjoyment. They are both too quick, lasting only ten seconds, and too much of a scrum. In a one on one, both gladiators charge at each other. This problem is compounded when there are a dozen fighters. They rush forward as a mass. In Domina gladiators occupy only an infinitesimal space, enabling them to clump up, separating only if they are knocked back or roll to avoid a slash.

Victory is important for more than the reward of credits, wine, water, and new gladiators. The skills of a fighter who wins increase dramatically. Victory in battle boost a gladiator's skills more than training the entire three hundred and sixty-five days of Domina. For this reason, it's crucial to bring a untrained recruit in the larger battles, with the hope they survive. Unbloodied gladiators are useless even if they've trained for a month. Another feature which seems of little consequence is the variety of gladiator. There are three types, the Thraex who wields sword and shield (and is the only starting class), the Murmilla, who carries two swords, and the Retianius who fights with spear, shield, and net. In my play-through I owned successful gladiators of each class, and couldn't detect a difference in performance. One might expect a rock, paper, scissors effect, as is common in other games, but as mentioned earlier, battles could be predicted without regard for each gladiator's fighting style.

And that seemed to be the largest problem. Few love a game which is too difficult, where defeat can ensure by a single mistake, with the loss of a valuable investment (Of course, I loved FTL in spite of this), so loss is made impossible. At the preset difficulty, the battles are too predictable, too easy. Domina has a Massive Chalice problem. My gladiators participated in 25 battles over four hours, but every gladiator who survived his second battle never died. Some gladiators fought ten battles before their release.

Domina tries to encourage the player to release veteran gladiators as a reward for their success. I did this, but not because I worried over the likelihood of a revolt (can they revolt?), but because my ludus included so many successful, skilled gladiators I could afford to free older ones, instead of dulling their revolutionary spark with wine. I had so many experienced gladiators, that at the final battle, which allowed the player to deploy all fifteen of their gladiators against eight enemies, my army included five gladiators who'd achieved the max skill value (200) in each category, while the enemy's best was only a sixty average.

Domina does reward the player with a twist at the end, and while I found this trick entertaining, it's easy to see how one might be dispiriting if they'd failed to act accordingly. Playing well, but not anticipating the ending could lead to an unbeatable conclusion: one that is lost by trickery instead of poor play.

In conclusion, Domina involves a lot of clicking. Improve gladiators, train gladiators, fight gladiators, and in the midst of mindlessly pressing the left and right mouse buttons, or the brief interludes of carnage, one will eventually realize that the battles are predictable and the mechanics not anymore engaging than any idle game hosted on Kongregate . The training is inconsequential, the fights, the key element of the game, are ten second gore fests without any player input, and there isn't much for the player to do elsewhere.

Though it looks cool, Domina is as dull as a wooden gladius upon Spartan Mail armor.

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