Today I’ve decided to try out Gladiator Heroes. I’ve heard that it’s a great game, but what got my attention was the Augmented Reality Battles. I’ve read that the AR mode was designed for iOS 11 so I assume it’s going to be really cool to view the fight in Augmented Reality but in reality my experience was a complete mass.
I am not here to bash the game, I think it’s an amazing game and I’m surely going to play it without AR on my iPad.
The AR features can be turned on once you go into battles. You can decide to play normally or click the AR button at the top to switch to the Augmented Reality mode. Once you are there the game asks you to slowly move the camera above a clear surface (“Move the device slightly, while looking over a clear surface“)—that exactly what I did. I tried spawning the battleground on the floor and on the table in a well lit area but the game just couldn’t locate a place. Only once I put some sort of a relatively large object on the floor it detected the surface.
Even once the arena rendered it was very glitchy. I just couldn’t get it to render at the location that I wanted to play the game on, no matter what I did. I spent like 30 minutes playing around with that UI and I never really got to play the game in the right place. I did play it at a certain location just so I can get the feel this AR mode.
Once I start playing, I saw that the abilities button in the UI are no longer there, whether in the ‘normal’ mode I was able to see those controls. Will all the great words about the new AR on the official game’s page on the App Store, I just left the game with a big frustration. Did I do something wrong, is the iPad camera’s field of view make is harder to detect a surface? Well, I don’t think so, because many of the games that I’ve already reviewed on AR Critic have detected surfaces relatively very fast without any big issues, of course not all of them.
I expected from such a big high-budget title to nail it right at the first time. I even though that maybe I am doing something wrong, but if this more is made using ARKit, there should be a problem at all and it should be seamless like other AR games that I’ve played, for example: Splitter Critters, ARise and other AR games for iOS 11.
Gladiator Heroes is a free-to-play game, so you don’t take any risk and you can try the AR feature yourself to see if it works well for you. Once I was able to play a bit, I liked what I’ve seen and I know it’s a side feature in this game, but if I’m going to play the game again (I probably will), I won’t play it in AR.
I would like to hear from you guys if you had a better experience or had the same issue?