Gladio Mori: no health bar, and your sword hand can end up on the other side of the arena

There is a line on the store page I find perfect: watch your sword hand, fighting gets harder when it is lying on the other side of the arena.

That is not a figure of speech. It is a mechanic.

The system that changes everything

Gladio Mori removes the health bar. Instead, every hit damages the body where it lands.

Injure a muscle and that limb loses strength. Sever an artery and your opponent bleeds out. Pierce a vital organ and the fight ends there.

Hands, arms and legs can be cut off entirely. Lose a hand and whatever it was holding goes with it. Lose a leg and the rest of the fight becomes an ordeal.

Geometry counts too: blunt weapons crack bones and stagger, while blades cut along their sharpened edge, which makes the angle of every strike matter. Armour stops attacks where it covers, and every gap stays a target.

In other words this is not a fighting game with physics. It is applied anatomy, and that is what makes it fascinating rather than merely gory.

You build your own attacks

That is the second pillar, and the studio has made it the centre of its community.

You create your attacks pose by pose, you paint your fighter, or you use creations shared by other players.

Recent patch notes show the studio kept expanding the moveset editor after noticing community mods going viral. They added functions to push creativity further, alongside new weapons and arenas.

That is the sort of studio that watches what its community builds and draws conclusions, which is rare and pays off.

What you can play

There is a solo campaign, and online arenas for up to four players, with crossplay between Steam, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series.

The game also offers split screen, which is exactly right for this proposition: there are few things funnier than watching somebody lose an arm beside you on the sofa.

Version 1.0, after almost two years

The game leaves early access today, and the studio's message deserves quoting for what it says about the process.

They thank players who spent two years arguing about hitboxes, posting movesets, complaining about bugs at two in the morning and telling them when something felt wrong. And they add that a lot of the game's features exist because of that.

A useful note for current owners: nothing changes for you, if you bought the game you have the full version.

The reception follows: 933 positive reviews out of 1,127, roughly 83 per cent.

At 15.99 euros it is a clear proposition for a specific audience. My only reservation concerns fatigue: a system this spectacular produces memorable moments for ten hours, and the question is whether the moveset editor and the community are enough to sustain the rest. Given how lively the shared mods are, I would say yes.

How many limbs were you down at your worst finish? We compare mutilations on the InsertCoins Discord.