Chivalry 2 (PlayStation 5): Roleplay potential and smooth medieval combat make it great

‘Tis but a scratch.

You know what feels great on a Saturday night? Leaping off a castle wall with five compatriots, double-tapping a button that makes your character scream his head off and listening to everyone around you follow suit. Suddenly, there’s a small army of knights bearing swords and hatchets, screaming like headless chickens as they descend upon a battlefield - whereupon they are swiftly killed and returned to a spawn point to do the exact same thing again. 

I can’t pin down exactly what makes Chivalry 2 so much fun for me, but this blend of immersive medieval roleplay along with all the ridiculousness that comes with multiplayer gameplay might be it. Developer Torn Banner Studios’ latest game pits two warring factions against one another, and players step into their steel boots on large maps to complete objectives and win the day - but above all, to slay as much of the other side as possible and die in glory. This game gives you all the tools you need to feel like you’re actually on a medieval battlefield, and then a few more to let you have some fun with that.

Chaaaaaaarge!

Chivalry 2 is a hack-and-slash action game that can be played in both third-person and first-person. I preferred first-person personally, as it made combat feel delightfully similar to Dying Light - another game that had pretty great melee combat. Combat has a rather high skill ceiling here and while it’s simple to pick up and understand the fundamentals, a new player will lose quite effortlessly to someone more experienced every time. 

Sure, you could wade into combat and spam the heavy attack button. It’s very likely that you get a few kills that way too, but there are systems in place to let you counter and riposte, jab at enemies instead of wildly slashing at them and swing in wide arcs to damage crowds. A very helpful tutorial teaches you all the basics when you start up the game, but you quickly learn that there are many more layers to defeating enemies beyond flinging your sword at them. I’m not joking, by the way - you can actually throw swords at people and it rules. 

It’ll take time to get used to Chivalry 2’s combat mechanics, but even as a fresh-faced squire I found a lot of fun in wildly charging into combat and spamming the attack button before inevitably meeting my doom. Multiplayer matches come in 40 or 64-player modes, which means that you can often rely on the help of your fellow soldiers on the battlefield. Likewise, you can also expect to lose very quickly if you get ganged up on and forget how to counter multiple enemies. I like that combat feels deep and varied, but I could also see its complexity turning newcomers away if they aren’t prepared to learn. 

Two factions are introduced at the start of the game: the ‘blue’ team (Agathans) and the ‘red’ team (Masons). These are the only two factions available to play with, but battles take them across maps big and small - from large muddy battlefields to cramped fighting pits. Objectives boil down to standard multiplayer fare, like escorting a payload and defending a location, but this game is a lot like Battlefield in that objectives are not something you typically have to pay a lot of attention to. Kill a bunch of people on the other side and whether or not you win an objective, you’re probably going to have fun. 

Chuck a chicken at your enemies

Great combat is all well and good, but it’s really only half of what makes Chivalry 2 so great. This game sells itself on multiplayer roleplay - to the point that roleplaying tips are even included in its tutorial. Various voice commands allow your character to bark out funny little voice lines, ranging from calling their team to charge forward to meekly apologising for something. 

These voicelines are fantastic and although it’s a little difficult to access them in the heat of battle using a controller, I loved being able to actually laugh at my enemies when I slayed them - or hear teammates apologise when they dealt out a bit of friendly fire. It’s the closest you can get to actually being on mic with your teammates, without having to deal with all the heavy breathing and toxic swearing that usually comes with that experience. 

There seems to be a general understanding between Chivalry 2 and its players, that a foundation for immersive roleplay has been laid out with its maps and combat - but neither side should be afraid to get weird with it. When your arm is cut off for example, the game tells you onscreen that, “it’s just a flesh wound,” and lets you continue fighting one-handed. When you pick up a chicken on the battlefield, clucking sounds are added to your voiceline wheel. You can also throw chickens at your enemies for damage. Why, you ask? Well, why not?

The sting of defeat

All these shenanigans help take the edge off what might otherwise be a brutal, bloody and downright exhausting affair. Matches can stretch longer than 20 minutes as your team gets beaten down by the enemy, but you’d hardly notice if you spent that match throwing pumpkins at your enemies. It’s fun! It helps that these maps are also really pretty. Even a muddy field looks gorgeous for a game of this caliber, riddled with small pools reflecting moonlight and bloody pikes stabbed into the earth. 

I do wish that some of that beauty extended to the character customisation, though. You’re given many options to create soldiers in different classes and factions, more so than the latest Battlefield even. Sadly, I never managed to create something that even vaguely looked like a glorious knight fit for battle. Adding to that disappointment is the fact that the character customisation system lets you create female characters, but gives you far less options to do so compared to their male counterparts. 

The class system could also use some finetuning. You have to play a specific class and earn XP to progress and unlock more weapons within that class. That means that you’re essentially starting from scratch whenever you want to try your hand at a new class, which is a shame, because these classes only really feel different once you unlock more impressive weapons for them. At the start, they feel almost interchangeable - you’d have to grind everyone out to really dive into their differences. 

It’s best not to take Chivalry 2’s matches too seriously as dying happens often no matter what you do, but the sting of a loss can still impact your enjoyment of any game. In games like Overwatch and Call of Duty, smaller teams let you have a bigger impact on the outcome of a match, so you always feel like you have a chance of turning the tide. Chivalry 2 is all about putting you in the boots of an expendable soldier, but the downside is that if you get a bad team, you might just have to accept defeat. I recommend playing this with friends rather than on your lonesome, because a string of defeats can really hamper the fun factor. 

Verdict

Chivalry 2 is a game that lets you scream alongside your fellow soldiers as you charge into battle flinging chickens at the enemy. It’s a barrel of fun that can occasionally be frustrating should you be stuck with a poor team, but that frustration is offset by gameplay that encourages players to chase kills and have fun rather than stick to a linear path. I do wish its character customisation and class systems were more robust, but meaty combat and lots of roleplay potential make this game quite unique in the first-person action genre. Give it a shot!

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