#game84

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.