The art, sound and effects are great. I like the weighty feel of the combat!

The combat itself still felt a little simplistic, however. The most aggravating part of it was there didn't seem to be a way to avoid taking damage while fighting enemies. Either attacks came out too quick to react to or I pretty much had to accept I would take damage if I fought anyone. I feel this could use some fine-tuning.

There needs to be some marker on the map to let you know where you are as I found it pretty difficult to work out where I was unless I was near a significant landmark. 

The dialogue system needs work. Being on a timer and unskippable means its either too fast to read or if you're a fast reader or you've read it before there's no way to skip it. I'd dump the timer and put in some way to step through dialogue manually (I'd suggest including a feature to completely skip dialogue as well).

That's all that comes to mind. Good work!

Really love the pixel art here. I also felt like combat was well-done, giving the player enough time to hit and retreat to avoid damage with the right timing. As others have mentioned, the enemies will chase you across the entire map. This might be a realistic representation of Roman centurions, but giving them a max chase distance might have been good, to avoid massive battles. Towards the end, I was just paying the death penalty to sit and slaughter the map's worth of enemies haha. 

Great work, this could definitely be expanded into a long form experience and I wouldn't complain :)

Terrific art style. I just love the look of the spartans' sprites and the ground sprites there's actually no sprites that I don't think are terrific. I love the juice on the swing. WOMP. I love the tween frames on the swing. You clearly know what you're doing with that; it feels MEATY I just fuckin love it. Sick particles in general. I like the fire as well. 

Now, the downsides of the combat. Hitting enemies is cool as heck, but I wish there was more of an indication when you GET hit. I would be fighting guys then suddenly go "Oh, wow, I have a lot of damage taken when did that happen"? Basically your only indication was the floaty red text over Leonardo. I almost could say what if you got flung back and your guy hit the ground? But that could be frustrating too. I'm flipping through dark souls videos to see how they handle the player getting hit, I think that's the same type of "hey you got hit" style you want. 

I wish I could manually advance ally text. The box seems like it's on screen for a while. 

I wish enemies didn't respawn when you're close to the fire. I kept getting mugged by invisible men and then I realized what was happening. Maybe you could safely just block respawns when you can see a fire? That can preserve the movie magic as well. Win win! 

I found the speedrun strat which is to just roll constantly. That's fun but you tend to aggro the whole map. That's how I discovered there's a manual safe zone around the wizard man at the lake. Ah ha! 

Ultimately I had to quit when I paused the game to write notes and couldn't unpause. Oopsies. 

This ended up being a nice little game. It was fun to follow your dev logs as well.

Sprites were clear and readable, as were the animations. Unlike Giggs, I had 150 denarii by the time I needed it. Guess I just killed errybody that got in my way.

I didn't find the kick very useful. Considering it being a sequel to 300, I think it might have been more effective to make the kick a super weapon that would get powered up as the player gets kills. Kicking would kick everything into slow motion like the film. Add some compressed "THIS IS SPARTA!" VO on top would be the cherry.

Anyway, I had fun, and was able to make it all the way through. Nice work!

Pros:

• Colour choice is nice and balanced
• Consistent visuals, particle effects aren't obnoxious and add nice little atmosphere
• Effective minimalist animations
• Humorous dialogue / intro

Cons:

• 150 denarii is a bit steep to grind in normal play. On my first playthrough I dodge-rolled past all the enemies and later found out I kited them all to the man on the beach which was very convenient, but if I hadn't it'd be a lot of walking around.
• Mouse-based menus in a game controlled by keyboard is a bit bothersome. More importantly the game seemingly cannot be unpaused.

Here & There

The dialogue boxes being on a timer feels restrictive, and the joke in-game is okay but at the same time I probably would have preferred having control and dropping the joke. The tiles sometimes don't line up, which I assume is a Unity thing, and as such a grid will flash onscreen for a frame or two in certain situations which is a tad jarring. You can kick or attack and roll at the same time, I'm not sure if this is a bad thing, but locking the different  movement/attack things so they're exclusive from one another might be better. Theme adherence is kinda there: It's a sequel to a thing that also makes it silly, but the mechanics do not seem to explore anything new, ie there's nothing to do in the game that might not have just happened in the actual 300 movie in terms of actions, such as kicks and slashes and cool rolling.

This is your first game iirc and I think you should be proud (this is far better than my first game). It's a tight little experience that is  consistent throughout and is bereft of any horrendous bugs, so you're well on your way to making some good stuff. I'm sure you've learned plenty so that your next game will be even better. Keep it up!