Chivalry Medieval Warfare Xbox 360 Review - Brutally Satisfying Combat.

By Sam Coles:

 

The medieval carnage that first graced its presence on the PC back in 2012 finally makes it to consoles. No not the PS4 and Xbox One, but their older brothers the PS3 and the Xbox 360 and the question is does it hold up well on consoles? Yes and No.

 

Chivalry Medieval Warfare is an FPS game but instead of have guns and all the usual tropes of an FPS, you have swords, maces, battle axes, bows, crossbows and much more. This game is multiplayer only although there is a singleplayer mode, but it does the Quake III way of thinking when they say singleplayer which means it consists of matches with bots, so you might as well jump into to multiplayer, that is if you have an Xbox Live Gold membership.

 

 

 

The gameplay has a first person perspective although you can change it to third person, but I would recommend sticking to first person because it’s easier to hit things or shoot people if you are playing the role of an archer. Your characters that you control feel heavy and you may look at this in a negative light, but that is not the case because it feels as if you are swinging a claymore and cutting off that person’s head and you really feel the fatigue and the over encumbered characters with their weaponry and armour. 

 

You have four classes to choose from before you head out into battle and get you limbs dismembered from your portfolio, you have the Archer who can use bows and cross bows along with a dagger as his side arm, you have the man at arms who can use one handed swords, axes, maces and Warhammers coupled with a shield, there is the Vanguard who uses long reach two hand weapons such as claymores, axes, lances and two hand Warhammers and finally you have the knight who is similar to the Vanguard because he uses two handed weapons, but he is heavily armoured. 

 

The game modes you can take part in this game are Team Deathmatch which if you’ve played any multiplayer game you know what this is, Team Objective which have a selection of creative scenarios such as invading a village and burning it down along with killing all peasants you know the sort of thing you would expect in a medieval game. Free for all where it’s every man for themselves where you have to kill as many people as you can, duel where there are only two of you and have a select number of rounds with no respawns in each and capture the flag.

 

 

Graphically the game is nothing to ride home about but to be honest the game wasn’t exactly a graphical power house on the PC either; however they do the service that they are there for. Little things like textures popping do happen but not too frequently, but that only seems to happen at the start of matches because you are playing online and it’s loading players and textures at the same time. The blood and gore effects make the game extremely satisfying especially when you get a well-placed headshot on your enemy and you see their head explode or fly off it really makes the weapons feel like that they have some punch when you slash your blade through someone. The sound design is excellent with your enemy’s death whales or when you make your character scream as you’re charging into battle, you can really tell that the sound department had a lot of fun when designing the sound in this game everything from the death screams to the sounds of slashing and squishing when you lock blades or maces.

 

The few nit-picks that I have with this game is the lag and latency issues that are currently in the game that could be because it uses a peer to peer connection, but it doesn’t help when your enemies are warping around you when you are trying to kill them. Graphics have a problem loading sometimes, but again that could be factored with the game being an online game and it’s expected. Although the sound is top notch it does have a habit of coming in at a delay sometimes or it is non-existent and it will drop out altogether such as the slash effects or you character’s dialogue.

 

Chivalry Medieval Warfare is a fun game to play with friends if you still have your last gen system although there are some flaws at this point with the connection problems as well as there not being any form of host migration, but it is still a fun game when you get into a game without the problems. Let’s hope they patch it soon.