Carrying a shield allows for permanent blocking, although all damage is directional and accurately tracked, so defences must actually be ‘aimed’ to connect with weapons. Each comes with a choice of equipment, including auxiliary weapons such as throwing knives. There are three melee classes of varying strength and mobility to choose from, as well as pesky archers. Simplicity and tight collision detection are the key, with the right mouse button blocking, the left slashing, and the mousewheel performing a long-reaching stab (up) or devastating overhead hack (down). The thrusts, parries, chops and feints that lead to death or victory are the qualities by which Chivalry shall live or die, and, happily, Torn Banner have crafted a hugely convincing first-person melee combat system.

Often have I seen my own body falling to its knees, the hands instinctively attempting to stem the flow of life’s own liquor. Heads have a tendency to roll, with a wonderfully macabre touch whereby the first-person view remains within the severed neck-cork.

Sometimes I hacked off a man’s arms and watched him cough up his ghost in the dirt in between spawning and dying, but, through the mist of blood and desperation, it was often hard to tell which of the severed meat-parcels belonged to me and which belonged to some other poor soul.Īlthough the tone is more Monty Python than Geoffrey of Monmouth, with the training voiced by a merry gang of light-hearted dialects, the animations and gurgling chokes of the dying are suitably grim. I might as well have just spent ten minutes watching a documentary about extreme surgical procedures.īy the end, the score didn’t matter and the nuance of the excellent combat had fallen to the wayside. A couple of days ago, I accidentally joined a 32 player match in the game’s arena, a small space with spike-laden pillars and flame-belching traps. Battlefields quickly become bottlenecks of coagulated blood as streams of respawning hopefuls rush back to their objective, which is either an actual trigger on the map or simply the soft flesh of every opponent. Ideally, spectating a bout of Chivalric slaughter should entail observing squadrons of men working in harmony, archers providing support, the vanguard forming blockades when enemy forces begin to engage, and the knights unleashed from the bay of pikes that bristle around them to punch through final defences. Chivalry’s knights, with their devastating attacks and cumbersome armour, are the Super Hadleys of their time, best used to deliver their devastating payload when accompanied by lighter, more agile men-at-arms. It’s at least partly for the same reasons I prefer manoeuvring a crate around the skies of World War The First rather than joining the jet-set, able to destroy what they cannot yet see. Given the choice, I’ll generally opt for the more personal affray of medieval warfare over the aloof and distant death-dealing of the modern variety. For several days now I have carved my way through the ranks of my enemies and now, upon this scroll, I do declare that this is Wot I Think(eth). Chivalry: Medieval Warfare is an extremely violent pageant of limb-lopping, a first-person deathmatch game as bloody as any I’ve ever played.

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