Blow By Blow

Hacking and slashing away at the highly skill-dependent medieval melee in Mordhau.

- T.J. Hafer

Most games that hand you a sword and point you in the direction of a battalion of foes feel empowering and heroic. After a few rounds of Mordhau, the prospect of heading into the breach seemed more terrifying than anything else. Of all the multiplayer melee games I’ve played, this one has decidedly the highest skill cap and the least patience for those who haven’t taken the time to learn its complex combat.

The upside is when you do go on a hot streak, you feel like way more of a badass than any of those more forgiving games can ever let you feel.

The basic premise is pretty simple. In the default Frontline mode, you take up arms as arugged warrior from one of nine classes (or you can design your own) and rush into the fray in up to 32-v-32, objective-based skirmishes on attractive, realistically structured medieval battlefields. Then, you probably die pretty quickly to someone a bit quicker or more experienced than you and respawn, hopefully having learned something to take forward into your next brawl.

Each clash of swords can look deceptively simple, but is actually highly complex in the huge variety of attacks, parries, and counters available to you. A well-scripted and straightforward tutorial will run you through the fundamentals, but it’s another matter entirely to execute the correct moves at the right time. It takes many hours just to start feeling competent, but the satisfaction of growing confidence as your execution improves is something no numerical progression system can replicate. It reminded me a lot of Sekiro, in that I started out as an absolute scrub and eventually started to think of myself as a badass swordsman, at least sometimes.

SWIFT AS A RIVER