Gladiator: Road to Rome Slot by Playtech

Maximus does the heavy lifting. When the gladiator turns up he arrives as a full stacked symbol, and every stacked Maximus turns wild, so a reel that fills top to bottom with him becomes a whole column of wilds standing in for the paying characters. That's Stack to Wild, and across the 25 fixed lines it's the base game's main way to anything sizeable.

The cast comes straight from the movie. Commodus scowls in his laurel crown, Lucilla appears in red, the old trainer Proximo sits under a purple turban, and a stone theatre-mask gladiator they call Tigerman rounds out the high symbols, all above the A-K-Q-J-10-9 royals carved into cracked grey tablets. The reels are set in carved wood against a sunlit Colosseum stuffed with crowd, banners draped down the tiers.

There are two ways out of the base game. Three or more of the crossed-weapons-and-shield scatters open the Colosseum Free Games, ten spins played with powerful modifiers layered onto the round. The other door is the Roman helmet: land three and you start the Jackpot Gladiator Bonus, a pick round where you choose gladiators to uncover gold, silver and bronze cash prizes, with a swing at a progressive jackpot on top of the cash.

One honest caveat about that last part. In the free demo the progressive reads "Not in use" and the Gladiator Bonus shows "Not available", so you can trigger it and see how it's built, but the jackpot only pays in real-money play. If you'd rather have the coin-collection spin on the same licence, Gladiator: Mega Cash Collect is Playtech's newer take, wrapped around a Cash Collect mechanic instead of stacked wilds.