Chivalry: Medieval Warfare Review (GunnerNo)
A Review For Posterity's Sake
I'm writing this review long after I and most of the playerbase have moved on not so much as to dissuade anyone from buying this game, but more-so to put into words what went wrong with the game and what scared away so many players at the end of its lifespan.
The Good
Before going in on the game's shortcomings, I think it is only fair to state what it did well. First and foremost, it's early combat was fantastic and practically defined the genre. Simply by allowing the player to accelerate and redirect their weapon midswing, Torn-Banner managed to make what easily could have been a mindless steel-slapfight into something that truly did require skill and thought.
Secondly, the game was just downright hilarious at times. A vicious battle could be occurring, with blood and viscera being flung in all directions and not even 10 feet away, two people from opposing teams could be sitting in a corner spamming voicelines at eachother. Most of these types of things were spontaneous, so you never knew when it'd happen, which served to only make it funnier when it did.
The Bad
As revolutionary as the combat system was, it certainly had its problems. Along with being able to accelerate your blade, you could also decelerate your blade as an unintended feature. This wouldn't be too much of a problem save for the fact that some weapons had a slow enough swing that if you decelerated, you could hit your opponent regardless if they blocked or not.
Exploits such as this quickly became accepted in the higher levels of play. Deceleration would naturally evolve into dead-angle swings, where you'd flick around, look straight up and overhead so your swing would instantaneously hit your opponent before they could even react. Fights stopped looking like fights and the skill-curve began to resemble a skill-cliff.
The Ugly
As players began to trickle away, the once humorous nature of the game melted away with them. The only servers that were reliably populated were duel-yards. If you objected to their abusive play-style, you got no sympathy and were told to either "get good" or stop complaining. This was the state the game died in. Not with a last hurrah for the playerbase, but a with a pitiful whimper of the last competitive player asking "Where did everybody go?"
Deadliest Warrior
The Deadliest Warrior expansion was pretty cool, kinda wish more people played it and that it had its own dedicated launcher/shortcut so I could have played it easier.
To Long; Didn't Read
Do not buy unless nostalgic or curious. Buy Mordhau or Chiv2 instead