I went into Chivalry half-expecting it to be a total war-esque strategy game. Instead, I found a first-person multiplayer hack’n’slash. Apparently It was pretty popular for a while after it was kickstarted and launched back in 2012. Even as recently as 2018, RPS put it 7th on their list of best multiplayer games on PC. Forgive my abundant ignorance and forgetfulness here, as always. I can’t even work out which Humble Bundle it came in, or why else I would have it.
I had a sunny day (twenty minutes) out at the training field AKA the only offline component of this game - partially because this was a new thing, for me, and partially because I didn’t really expect to find much of anything to do online. There I learned the basics of combat – a slash bound to left click, a poke and a carve both bound strangely to the mouse wheel, a block/parry to right click – and the point of each of the four class options. I shot some bows, I launched a catapault, I tried to discern the supposed backstory for between the two factions of this multiplayer venture, a conceit that was in no way further pushed by the game thereafter.
Eventually I headed to the server list, where I found a few middling to full options, confirming that as of November 2019, Chivalry (the game, anyway) is not dead.
And after a couple of hours of that, I feel comfortable in saying it is actually (still) silly, irreverent and enjoyable, even beyond its vaguely serious medieval veneer. Most of the games I joined would either be Team Objective or Free For All – in either case I would get out-poked and out-positioned and then watch my character buckle to the ground, blood spraying, head or arm rolling elsewhere. I was killed by cookie-cutter men with big axes and small daggers, men with spears, men with bows who pulled out knives after I ran up to them and whiffed a stab from behind. Despite my terrible stats, no-one seemed interested in flaming me. The FFA’s especially felt like an absurd festival of inconsequential blade-swishing - I left every game with a vague gnawing to keep playing and a horrendous K/D ratio. I’m almost sorry I didn’t round to it sooner.
