izigame.me

Perhaps a great game when it came out, but don't recommend it now. The entry level is too high, the ceiling is higher, and most fights end up with being animation spammed out into some kind of death over and over again while not understanding how a person was able to land three hits on you before you can swing up into a simple strike they're almost certainly going to parry anyway. Only explanation or guide to progress in this is "git gud" when there's no explanation for a play to get maybe one kill per hundred deaths because you're doing nothing to these people.
Only reliable way to contribute at all in this game as a new player is just to play the objective like Mirror's Edge: Do everything but battle and then parkour like your life depends on it the moment any enemy sees you because no matter what combination or loadout they're just going to wreck you. Think all because you've got throwables or a bow you're going to fare well? Nope, they'll just block it and then kill you with a Zwei or Maul before you have the chance to start swinging with a dagger.
Edit: After multiple rounds of going into the deficit of maybe one or two kills compared to forty deaths or more, it seems the only valuable strategy to contribute towards team matches is to run whatever the default or lousy crude armor you start with which will then indicate to the enemy team you are indeed a walking one hit kill slab of MEAT for juicy health regeneration for them. The best strategy here of course is again to Mirror's Edge your way around long enough to distract them and then aggressively backcap as five different level 100+ knights get overly hungry for an easy kill like sharks.
Edit 2: Since doing this review I've gotten quite a bit of toxic statements hurled my way from community members (in-game) such as accusations of throwing matches, intentional horrendous play, costing the team the game, running around doing nothing and other generally nasty comments I don't want to repeat here. The one I will comment on specifically is bullying with the excuse "Public shame is the best teacher" which is an absolutely horrible method of new player retention and does not build a positive, reinforcing environment to get into to understand the aforementioned "git gud" stated earlier.
Edit 3: As of writing this, there is currently a PS+ event with double XP and gold as a flood of new console players come in to try the game. The community's response is to hurl insults towards the new/console players such as calling them bots and not real people. Coincidentally, there is (as of this edit) a 215 page Steam Discussion topic of why player retention is so low and why this game peaks at under 1,000 players.
Edit 4: After playing the double XP weekend with the relatively inexperienced PS players, it is at the least more pleasant to fight players who don't know every minute method to throw swings and kicks significantly faster than you to get a better feeling of the fighting mechanics. It does however demonstrate a problem not spotted until now which is that the game has flawed netcode where strikes that should hit don't and strikes that should be parried go through. It's because the tickrate is too low when you're dealing with attack windows of a few frames, plus there's no compensation for latency (aka rollback) so you're absolutely doomed playing with 100ms ping or more. A fighting game needs good netcode for precision and this does not.
Edit 4.5: I feel like after roughly 15-20 hours of gameplay I've "seen" everything, the only important unlocks in the game are weapon slots and a cheap/crude set of armor per weight class (light/medium/heavy) which you’ll get these in that time, and the rest is just padding it out with cosmetics so your peasant starts to appear like a proper knight. Map rotation wise you'll be playing the same 3-4 maps in the same configuration and some are variations of each other so expect to be running the same layouts over and over. Most team gameplay ends up as people running to bonk the enemy in the head for up to a half hour as dedicated support options are rare.
Edit 5: Uninstalled. It's just not fun, and playing this makes me feel worse than before booting it up that playing nothing at all seems preferable. As one final note to finish the review for now: I notice a lot of unhelpful thumbs up reviews such as "People who don't like this are bad at the game" posted recently while the game is sitting at exactly the 70% recent approval mark, the convenient breakpoint between "Mixed" and "Mostly Positive" on the reviews score.