There’s a strong genre niche for first-person medieval warfare that I have been sleeping on. Until now. Torn Banner has released Chivalry 2, the sequel to the mod-turned-full-game Chivalry: Medieval Warfare.
Their last game, Mirage: Arcane Warfare didn’t do too hot. But Chivalry 2 is the studio’s return to form. A well-realised vision of chaotic war in the Middle Ages is executed with strong mechanics, ridiculous blood and gore, with just the right amount of snark and humour to round it all off.
Presentation
The look and sound of Chivalry 2 has the feel of a AAA game production. And you would be surprised that it’s not priced as such.
The locale you are fighting in all look believable. The armours of soldiers look battered, grimy and used. The clinging of swords and the slashing of flash sounds evokes the right emotions when heard.
And the ridiculous amount of voice lines for your character, that will for the most part just be boiled down to a choir of screaming men and women, charging to their eventual death, only to respawn again in the next wave.
Chivalry 2 looks spectacularly polished. You can look at the right places to see just a bit of jank that reminds you that it’s still a video game. But that’s okay. When most of the time you’ll be charging forward and striking enemies, Chivalry 2 successfully sells that fantasy of being one little pawn on an enourmous battlefield.
At it’s best, it’s utter chaos with blood, fire and screaming overwhelming the orchestral chorus that appears in the most crucial moments of a match. It’s spectacular.
Outside of the one usual quirk of an Unreal Engine 4 game where textures are slightly slow to load, Chivarly 2 looks fantastic.
Chivalry 2 wants to capture the feel of a Game Of Thrones battle, which I reckon they did get close. But I did not expect them try and pull a Monty Python as well.
The voice lines you hear, either spammed by players, yourself, or the occasional NPCs you’ll encounter in some maps, are just stupid fun. In a map where one side is raiding and destroying a village, one of the peasants remark how convenient that all the women and children are off to a picnic.
You’ll either be sold (or turned off) by the default starting voice available for your character: Squire Boy. He’s meek. He’s a coward. He’s your average peasant Joe that’s also self-aware and sometimes break the fourth wall. And he’s the only guy that’ll tell off why is everyone is screaming non-stop. And will scream out loud proud that he’s fighting “for that guy we like”.
Squire Boy is truly best boy.
If you are not a fan of the sillyness, there are other more serious voices you can have for your character. And there are also female voices too. Not as much variety when compared to what’s offered for male characters, but they’re of the same quality.
Gameplay
Chivalry 2 is a never-ending war between the Kingdom of Agatha (the blue team) and the Mason Order (the red team).
You are one of the soldiers in a 40-player or 64-player PvP match, fighting for the side you’re on. Or fight for your own glory in free-for-all deathmatches.
Is This A Fighting Game?
As the setting implies, most of your arsenal involves melee combat. And boy is the melee combat good. You have light and heavy attacks. You can alter the direction of attack for some weapons with a direction input. You can block and punish blocks with a good kick. There’s a dash. And you’ll need to be aware that the hitbox is exactly on the weapon. Knowing that leads to some of the advanced techniques requiring finesse in camera control.
Is this a fighting game? The really decent tutorial acknowledges the similarities, and some of the basic 101s of a fighting game carries over.
There’s the concept of hit advantage, but it’s simpler and does not require you to learn frame data. There’s the concept of a neutral game but it’s explained as a foothold in-game (and not a vaguely sexual term). There are animation cancels via feints. You can do perfect parries by landing the same type of hit against your opponent first.
The only thing missing is the air game. Unless you count standing on a catapult and flinging yourself to the front of the battlefield with it as a launcher.
If you have dabbled in a fighting game before, you might find the same joys in Chivalry 2. There are no special inputs here, but you’ll need to be good at wiggling the camera. If you can wrap your head with how different the controls are, the basic fundamentals you know and love (and hopefully mastered) can be well applied here.
Exhilarating Chaos
However, Chivalry isn’t a 1v1 game (unless you go in the tournament servers). Chivalry 2 can be a 20v20 or a 32v32 game. And you better expect to be easily outnumbered and get smashed, burned or decapitated if you go running around thinking you’re a hero.
Fights can be as quick as one good heavy slash of a war axe. Or an arrow in the head. Or war axe being hurled straight to the head. If you manage to turtle it out and survive a 1v4 assault on your own for a good minute, that’s already a fantastic feat, that usually ends with you dead.
But this chaos of war is the balancing factor so that players of all levels can enjoy.
Don’t worry about not being good. Baiting enemies out so they forgot to play the objective by a few seconds might bring you an inch closer to victory.
So is sending down yourself into a suicidal charge in hopes of sowing disorder in their assault. Even a battle-harden veteran can be taken out easily by just overwhelming them in numbers. Or a good shot from a catapult.
(Unless it’s Team Deathmatch, where it operates with a ticket counter tickling down upon a team member’s death. That, is one mode you don’t want to be quick and be dead.)
Medieval Warfare
Chivalry 2 is a multiplayer only game, with three modes at launch: Team Deathmatch, Free For All Deathmatch and Team Objective.
The first two are self-explanatory- just rack up the kills. Team Objective is the bread-and-butter of the game, where you play various different objectives depending on how far the progress of the match is.
For example, in the Coxwell, the Mason Order is on the assault, pillaging the village and slaughter the Agathan army and the peasants that lived there. Meanwhile, in Falmire, the Agathians is on the assault to free their captured hero from the Masons.
The objectives are so interwoven with the lore that which side is on the attack or defence is always set in stone.
The most common objective types are breaching castle gates where the attackers have to smash the main gate and can put massive ladders to breach the sidewalls. While on the defender side, they can have archers and ballista operators shoot them out orr drop big boulders down at the front of the castle gates.
The other common objective is pushing a payload of sorts, in the guise of a breaching machinery. You’ll also be capturing flags, looting a town and defending VIP NPCs.
The maps are wonderfully well-crafted with standout set-piece moments for each, making them play just a bit different. I like how some part of the map is designed to have a choking point, where you see everyone piling up and battling to the death.
And there are many angles where you can just take a deep breath and look at how big the scale of these battles are, and you’re playing one tiny part in it all.
But there is one problem. It feels easily one-sided. The majority of the matches I play it’s easy to see the assaulting team taking the W, as they can just continue to snowball as the match progresses.
It’s so apparent that in one map where the tables are turned in the last phase where the assaulting team has to be on the defence to escort a VIP NPC, the losing defending team can easily turn it around and win. All the hard work and effort, only to lose because the AI for the NPC isn’t smart enough to wait for his army to protect him first.
At least Chivalry 2 is not designed for competitive play. The game goes out of its way to obfuscate the scoreboard- you can only see it if you really want to see it.
Unless the server is full of more serious players asking the noobs to get good, Chivalry 2 is still fun regardless of the result of the matches. I just wish it’s a teensy bit easier to swing the odds of a match rather than seeing the defending team just delaying the inevitable, and was only lucky the assault team are terrible when they win.
Content
Chivalry 2 launched with 8 maps, 3 for Deathmatch and 5 for Team Objectives, which is not much of course. But the developers are committed to providing free updates with the intention to double the existing map count. For free.
Also, the game is purely multiplayer. You can play offline with bots, but experience and unlocks only happen in online matches. The good news is there are global servers, including 4 in Singapore for us SEA players. And there is a server browser too.
Chivalry 2 also supports cross-play at launch. No cross-play parties yet, but at least the servers are well alive and full of players during the first week of launch.
There are 4 different classes, each with three subclasses making it 12 in total. Each plays a bit different with some difference in toolset and stats. So there’s a variety of way to play. That’s not counting that each class can equip at least four different primary and secondary weapons, all with different characteristics.
The game does have microtransactions, but there’s a disclaimer that pops up saying it’s only for those who really wanted to support the devs. The premium currency is used to unlock cosmetics early, without needing to reach a certain level and have a certain amount of in-game currency.
But at least the pricing isn’t money-grabbing. The cheapest denominator available for premium currency, priced at RM8.49 on the Epic Games Store, is enough to unlock two of the more expensive cosmetics, and a couple of more common ones. You can safely ignore the mini-buys, unless they start to put premium-currency-only cosmetics.
Personal Enjoyment
I didn’t expect to like Chivalry 2 this much before I did this review. Granted I’m relatively new to this genre niche (unless you count For Honor which I used to be familiar with), so I am just the average medieval game enjoyer here.
But as a newcomer, Chivalry 2’s chaotic battles are so much fun. Even when I’m not contributing much I discover so much about how many details the game has to offer on the side.
Learning the complexities of melee combat, and be rewarded when you triumph on the battlefield is one thing. But to discover you carry a clucking chicken and brandish it to assert dominance and strike fear on your opponents is just equally fun.
The Monty Python-esque cheekiness is what seals the deal for me. Come on, you can lose a limb and the game goes “It’s just a flesh wound!” and let you fight one-armed still. Killing people this way, just before you succumbed to blood loss, is immensely funny, satisfying and also utterly gruesome now that I think of it. And that’s Chivalry 2’s main appeal right there.
As stated earlier, I’m not familiar with Mordhau or any other medieval melee warfare games, so I can’t say how good Chivalry 2 is in comparison with the competition. What I can say is, from a fresh perspective of a newcomer to this genre niche, Chivalry 2 is bloody good.
For the most part, the game feels very polished. Though the UI in the menus could use another pass in polish. Navigating the customisation options with a controller is fiddly. Sometimes the back button exits you out of two sub-menus instead of one which is irksome.
Verdict
Chivalry 2’s large-scale battles are chaotic fun, and it’s built under a solid foundation of a complex but easily learned combat system. Layer in a bit of silly gags to offset the serious tragedy of war and the gory violence and you get a recipe for a fun multiplayer game.
Chivalry 2 can stand triumphant. It’s one wonderful medieval combat game worth your time and money.
Reviewed on PC. Review copy provided by the publisher
Chivalry 2
Chivalry 2's large-scale battles are chaotic fun, and it's built under a solid foundation of a complex but easily learned combat system.
Layer in a bit of silly gags to offset the serious tragedy of war and the gory violence and you get a recipe for a fun multiplayer game.
- Presentation 8.5
- Gameplay 9
- Content 7
- Personal Enjoyment 9