Chivalry 2 Review

I never played the original Chivalry, so I’ve got no way of telling you whether or not Chivalry 2 is a massive improvement on the first game, nor whether or not players who liked that one will like this.

What I do know, though, is that Chivalry 2 is some of the most obnoxiously brainless fun I’ve played in a long time, and I’m absolutely enraptured with its bloody absurdity. 

Chivalry, for those who don’t know, is a series all about going online with friends and strangers, and then engaging in large-scale medieval battles full of gore, flying limbs, and flying weapons. On the face of it, it’s just about attacking and blocking, but the combat can be so much more involved than that.

Hack and slash

Most fights will be intense duels between you and another player trying to anticipate each other’s moves and locked in a near-endless fight to the death, until one of you slips up, and then your head gets lopped off. Every other fight is going to be an attempt at that first fight, but it’ll get ended very rapidly by a gaggle of teammates on one side or the other that descend upon the bout like a plague of locusts, only leaving once someone has died, sometimes at the hands of their own friends. 

Along with your basic attack, you also have a vertical swipe and a poke/stab. I say poke there because I don’t think you stab people with the head of an axe, but I’ve never been on the receiving end of that, so I can’t say for sure. You also have feints, parries, dodges, ducks, kicks, jabs, charge attacks, and yeets. 

Parries beat most strikes, kicks beat parries, jabs are faster than strikes and can interrupt them, dodges and ducks don’t beat anything, but not getting hit is good, and yeets are entertaining if someone is trying to escape your might. 

You’ve got to head it to them

Alongside the fights you’re going to get into, you’ll also have a lot of general silliness to enjoy. Some levels are littered with bits and bobs you can throw at each other, like rocks and barrels, but you can also make your own projectiles out of the severed heads of unfortunate plebs scattered on the battlefield. Let me tell you; you’ve not laughed properly until you’ve had someone charging at you, axe raised high above their head, and screaming like they’re trying to wake the gods, only for you to put them down by chucking your mate’s head at them. 

The depth in the combat has the potential to be absolutely incredible, and the longer you spend with the game, the more likely it is that you’ll start to plumb those depths. However it is, ultimately, a really silly game about hyperviolent combat with overt absurdity littering every other second. 

All of this takes place across multiple different game modes. While the sieges, which are fights with multiple objectives spanning massive maps with varied locations, are probably the highlight of most modes, you’ve also got team deathmatches to take part in, and even free-for-alls if you’re feeling particularly self-loathing and chaotic. 

You’ve got to commit

There are four classes in Chivalry, and each has three sub-classes with their own unlockable weapons. You can very much play the game in a way that feels good to you, and in whatever situation that calls for it. It’s got a very strange community: the game itself decries the archers, but every class has a role to play, and that makes it a lot of fun to mess around in. 

I am in love with Chivalry 2, but it’s not the best it could be just yet. As it stands, the party system is literally useless at the moment. There are also a few connection issues here and there too. However, assuming they get fixed, Chivalry 2 could well be my go-to game for killing a bit of time–and a lot of people–for years to come. The developers will also be adding in horses in a later update, and that sounds truly wonderful.