FOR THE ORDER

Go out without a limb in CHIVALRY II’s glorious medieval battles

- Tyler Wilde

To put it bluntly, this game is some of the most fun you can have on PC right now. It’s a riveting, theatrical medieval warfare game that’s equally about martial arts mastery and roleplaying as a Middle Ages buffoon. Sometimes you spend 30 intense seconds expertly dueling another player with swords, other times you’re skewered by a ballista bolt while shaking your fist and declaring that you’re “power incarnate”.

At the center of Chivalry II are 64-player team objective-based matches. These are multi-stage battles that see castles sieged with rolling towers and ladders, peasants slaughtered, and caravans ambushed. They all start roughly the same way: both teams lined up and sprinting at each other with swords, axes, polearms, maces, bows, and more. I approach these charges by smashing the ‘yell’ key to howl stupidly, throwing my shield into the mass of bodies, chucking my sword after it, and then meeting the enemy with hacks from my secondary ax. If I’m lucky, I break through the line and chase down the cowardly archers who stopped running 50 yards short of the fight.