Ever since Chivalry: Medieval Warfare and the Mount and Blade series wetted our collective appetites for melee combat, few developers have dared to pick up from where these titles left off in furthering the nascent genre. Chivalry was eaten alive by its developers and who knows when or if we will see the long-awaited Mount and Blade sequel. Blade Symphony, a valiant attempt at continuing the genre, failed to gain any traction despite it’s nice visuals and good mechanics. And let’s pretend Wars of the Roses never happened. But since 2017, Triternion has steadily crowdfunded, built, polished, and in April 2019, finally released their debut game, Mordhau. And in doing so, they have single-handedly breathed new life into this incredible style of game.

Melee combat has always been trickier than gunplay in games. There is simply more that you can do with melee weapons and while I’m not a coder myself, I can imagine that having to account for all of the possible situations that can occur in melee combat to be a considerable challenge to convert into lines of code. It’s not enough to just have horizontal and vertical attacks – they can come at any possible angle in between. Stabs generally won’t all go to the same place either, so that has to be considered. Then there are parries, ripostes, chambers, shields, and many other techniques that anyone who has done MEMA or fencing would know about. Taken together, it’s no surprise that first-person melee combat is so relatively under-explored compared to other styles of game.

Mordhau has three basic game modes for you to dive into. “Frontline” puts you and your team in a tug-of-war/king-of-the-hill style match against opposing players. “Battle Royale” mode is just that: you vs a maximum 63 other players with weapons scattered around the map; kill or be killed. Finally, “Horde” pits players against increasingly difficult waves of AI enemies. It’s only once you utilize the in-game server browser that Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch and Skirmish modes are accessible. Currently, if you’re interest is dueling, you’ll have to make do with deathmatch servers that are repurposed specifically for dueling – and you better obey the code of those servers!

If you’re new to first-person melee games, you will absolutely need to play the tutorial. You’ll also get 2,500 of the in-game currency for your trouble just for completing it. The game’s “240” control scheme is incredibly polished but it takes getting used to and real effort to master. It balances flexibility and creativity with consistency. However, if you can’t be bothered to learn it, there are other simpler control schemes built-in that you can use – or you can just take the spear and stab away. But it’s really worth taking the time to learn the “240” methods, as it unlocks the true potential of what a player can do in any combat situation. Outside of the tutorial, the best place to practice is in duels.

One of the brilliant aspects of Mordhau is its in-game progression system. Players unlock weapons and cosmetic items by earning in-game currency (that cannot be bought for real money) and experience through playing the game. The genius of this system is that all armor at a given tier is the same. You start with the basics of everything armor-wise and only cosmetic upgrades can be unlocked. No matter how pretty (or ugly) it looks, level 3 armor is always level 3 armor. As a result, a new player doesn’t need to worry about unlocking armor for the purpose of survival at all; they can instead spend their first hours of the game exploring the many different weapons that the game has to offer, from a butcher’s knife to a lute to a greatsword to a halberd. There’s something for everyone (even a frying pan!), and if the first few weapons that you unlocked aren’t cutting it (heh heh) for you, then you’re only 2-3 rounds away maximum from your next unlock. It’s the exact opposite of a punishing unlock system where you’re forced to consider the opportunity costs of buying one item or another, and this makes your first few hours of Mordhau a much more enjoyable experience.

But the best part of the game is the actual gameplay. First person melee combat is absolute chaos and utterly hilarious. You will lose your head and limbs seemingly randomly because your teammate swung their sword too wildly and hit you by mistake. You’ll bash another player’s face in with the maul only to be headshot by that annoying archer. And you will love every bloody, hilarious minute of it. If you aren’t laughing your ass off the first few times that your severed head rolls away from your body, then you take yourself way too seriously. The violence of Mordhau, like its predecessor Chivalry, crosses the line into comical territory, and that’s a major part of the charm of the game: even when you’re getting killed and losing, you’re still having fun. Very few games manage to pull this off.

However, Mordhau is not perfect and there are issues that need to be addressed. First and foremost, map balance in Frontline mode is abysmal to the point that players who are unlucky enough to auto-fill on the weaker side don’t even bother trying to win. Worse, there are only 4 playable maps for Frontline and all suffer from this problem to greater or lesser degrees. New, balanced maps are needed desperately. The game also currently lacks the dedicated dueling servers that Chivalry fans so loved, but those should be added in soon. The stats page is also misleading because it only counts your Frontline and Battle Royale stats and not any other game mode, which diminishes its usefulness. Finally, while duels tend to bring out the honorable side of the playerbase, the opposite can be said for Frontline mode. Prepare for some serious toxicity in chat as people whine about team killers, map balance, archers, and how they’d be so much better if it wasn’t for their team.

Overall, I cannot belabor the point too much that this is a AAA release from a new indie developer that is priced at…$30. This kind of quality at that price point is almost unheard of nowadays in games, even those made by major studios, and not a single microtransaction or paid DLC is in sight. The only thing that I might hesitate about is the lack of maps and balance issues with said maps, but that’s what dueling and deathmatches are for. It’s clear that the developers were more interested in creating a solid and polished base game that they could build up from, rather than just make a ton of content that’s full of holes and bugs. Their choices seriously paid off. Take a stab at Mordhau!