On April 29th, Triternion game studios released Mordhau, a vast, epic-scale fantasy combat game that will have you hooked from the very beginning. If you’re like me, you haven’t played a game quite like this before, and you’re relatively new to the massive-scale combat scene from games such as Chivalry and For Honor. While I wasn’t entirely unfamiliar with the premise, I’d never had the chance to try my hand at one, despite my great love of fantasy and the medieval period in general. Then, a friend insisted I watch the trailer, as he had recently picked up the game and “knew” I would love it, and while warfare games typically aren’t within my wheelhouse, I shrugged and gave it a look anyways. It had armored knights and Vikings in the image gallery on the game’s Steam page, how bad could it be?
Within mere moments, I knew I wanted this game. The trailer nearly had me cheering along, watching as those same Vikings that piqued my interest earlier hurled crude battle axes at distant foes, scoring a remarkably satisfactory kill even from a spectator’s point of view. Cavaliers on horseback ran down pedestrian foes, their lances colliding in a spectacular display of gore and resulting in an instant death. I watched in awe from a first-person perspective as swords, shields, and all manner of my favorite medieval weaponry collided in glorious melee combat. There was something for everyone, and while at the time I was certain I knew what my preferred type of character would be, I quickly learned the game had a way of balancing itself that would render the unstoppable heavy-armored murder machine with a sword and shield that I yearned for less of a walking death dispensary, and more of a well-rounded experience that required a degree of skill to execute. In this review, I’ll take you through my opening impressions, the things I learned the more I played, what I love about the game, and things that could be improved upon.
Starting out
From the get-go, I soon realized it would be in my best interest to play through the tutorial. As a way of encouraging you to do so, the game offers 2,500 in-game gold to spend on customizing your character upon completion, but I’ll talk more on that later. The tutorial opens up with a fairly standard, “So you’re the new recruit, eh?” line, then quickly devolves into a silly, self-aware sense of humor that I found funny and endearing. It runs you through the basics, teaching you the game’s intuitive controls right down to which direction you swing your weapon from, and moves on to archery training (during which you’re required to pass the hilarious “Hans test,” which I’ll not spoil for you here), and from there has you riding around on horseback and even launching a catapult. All of this within 15 minutes, at which point you’re more or less good to go, and released into the world of Mordhau.
Just about all manner of weapons and armor are available, from daggers, cleavers, and the like to bandages, quarterstaffs, and even a Lute you can carry along to role play as the bard of your team to great comedic effect (right up until you get murdered by a roving pack of sword wielders from the other team). New weapons can be bought relatively cheaply using the game’s in-game currency (gold), which is earned by playing objectives and performing well in-game. Most of what you’ll end up buying are purely cosmetic upgrades; the crude looking rusty sword performs just as well as the carefully honed castle-forged piece of metal artwork that’s available for 4000 gold…but when you see an opponent wielding the same weapon that just looks nicer, it dawns on you that the quest to outfit yourself in your ideal equipment has begun without you even noticing. Then…there’s the toolkit, which allows you to build spike traps, blockade walls with arrow slits in them, and ballistae that act as turrets any of your teammates can use. Early on the toolkit was quickly ignored, but one of the friends I played with soon discovered what a hidden gem it actually was. I can’t tell you how great it feels to suddenly see a kill confirmation flash across your screen, knowing that somewhere in the distance a cavalier on horseback just ran into one of your spike traps and is cursing up a storm.
Where to go from there
The game has a few basic modes; the standard two team clusterfuck deathmatch mode, a horde mode where you fend off waves of enemies as a team, and then Frontline mode which is where I’ve spent most of my time. Two teams of 32, each with a starting camp and a string of locations that can be claimed and used as forward spawn points for each team. Special objectives will arise throughout the map depending on how many forward spawn points you’ve taken, and the team that completes all of these objectives (or takes all of the enemy strongholds) wins the match. There’s a degree of strategy involved, and even the team with the best fighters can find themselves losing to a well-thought-out battle plan, or a stealthier character that slips around behind their ranks and captures an objective while they aren’t paying attention. It only took me one or two rounds of Frontline to realize it was the game mode I strongly preferred as opposed to the others. Being an entirely online game, there isn’t a single player experience outside of the tutorial, so if its a story mode you’re looking for I regret to inform you there is none to be found.
The combat itself
I’ve been told the combat in Mordhau is both incredibly well done, and by others that it isn’t as good as it is in similar games that I’ve never played. So while it may not be to the tastes of some, I found it easy to pick up initially, but it definitely strikes me as a game that requires time and practice to well and truly master. Parrying (or blocking if you’re carrying a shield) is as simple as right clicking, but for those who prefer a more aggressive playstyle, you can practice your “chambering,” which is blocking with a mirroring swing of your weapon. The catch? You have a miniscule window of opportunity, and if you mess up and swing from any direction other than one that mirrors your opponents, you’re getting hit. Difficult to say the least, as you have to pay close attention to your opponent’s movements then quickly adjust to ensure you’re swinging from the right direction, but when you pull one off, you’re given the tremendous satisfaction of steel clashing against steel, and the opportunity for an immediate counterattack. Limbs can be hacked off, and heads can be severed (which makes for a particularly gruesome first-person death experience). Losing an arm or a leg guarantees that your death is imminent, either by bleeding out where you stand (or fell, if it was a leg), or due to the fact that you are now disarmed in a very real sense but also a much more ironical one and are at the mercy of your opponent.
Some weapons like longswords and spears can be choked up on or held differently with the “Mordhau grip,” allowing them to be wielded at close quarters with less danger of striking nearby allies. Standard longbows or recurve bows are great at a distance, but it also paints a target on you as it makes you susceptible to getting murdered while trying to switch out from your bow to the arming sword you carry on you “just in case” when the guy with a two-handed maul rushes up and caves your head in. Crossbows eliminate the degrading of aim the longer your bow is drawn, but come with the downside of longer reload times, along with the fact that your character literally looks down at the ground so he can stand on the foot rung attached to the front of your crossbow to redraw the bow string. It leaves you wide open and got me killed more than a few times, but shooting a mounted cavalryman in the head and dinging him off his horse is worth all the embarrassing deaths.
What I love
The thrill of first-person melee combat integrated into a well designed world of the same time period makes for a truly enjoyable maiden voyage into the realm of medieval multiplayer. Even building custom classes with their own weapons, armor, and equipment layout is fun in its own way, and then testing them out in game to see if the build you’ve slapped together has any merit, or if you’re just running into a meat grinder because that weapon loadout doesn’t function the way you thought it would. Or you could outfit yourself with a makeshift uniform, and take it upon yourself to be a referee in a dedicated dueling server (which actually happened). All in all, it’s a great time to be had, and I don’t regret my purchase in the slightest. That being said…
Things that could be improved
While there’s no such thing as a truly perfect game, Mordhau definitely has a few issues that make you take pause and wonder why they weren’t thought out a bit better. The menu system isn’t very user-friendly, and can be confusing as you try to figure out how to navigate through the different tabs and perform various functions such as renaming character builds you’ve created. Finding a decent server that isn’t terribly far away and creating ungodly levels of ping can be an issue at times, too, and nothing is more frustrating than lagging all over the map until you get cut down by a guy because your parry didn’t register in time. I realize no online gaming experience is ever going to be 100% free of any lag, but it feels like things could be dialed in a bit better considering this is a game where precise timing is crucial. Overall it wasn’t enough to ruin the fun I had with the game, though, and considering I approached it with a laid-back attitude to begin with, there was plenty of forgiveness to go around. But these issues were prevalent enough that they made me sit up and take notice, so I thought them worth mentioning.
Final Rating: 8 out of 10, with the possibility of a 9 if they rework their menu system and continue to improve their servers. Unless you really just aren’t in to melee combat or online team-based games, I would recommend picking this one up.
