MORDHAU

Mordhau is an massively-multiplayer online Mediaeval combat game, primarily based on melee combat. In basic terms, you slash and block, but there's a few jargon terms and techniques to understand to really get to grips with the mechanics.

With the default controls, left-clicking your mouse results in a strike, and a scroll-wheel is a stab. Right-click blocks, the F to kick. WASD to move, mouse to look. Actions cost stamina, and if you deplete your stamina, you are vulnerable to be disarmed.

The weapons have different attributes; attack range, speeds, attack power etc, and you may need to change your strategy based on these. Stabs can be faster, but can be significantly weaker e.g. axes are designed for striking rather than stabs. The stab can be beneficial in narrow areas because you don’t want to hit a wall, or crowded areas especially when you have team-mates - to avoid friendly-fire, you don't want to wildly swing. Careful, more accurate stabs are highly beneficial here.

You need to time the block action to parry, and you can quickly follow it up counter (“riposte”). A different type of counter is the "chamber" where you counter with the same type of attack (and angle).

You can "morph" your attack by changing your input command from stab->strike, or strike->stab. This can throw off your opponent if they attempt to block or counter. Another thing you can do is turn into your attack to hit earlier, or conversely - look away from your attack to "drag" which delays the attack.

You can also "feint" which is where you begin your attack, then press a button to cancel.

You can also kick, which does a bit of damage, and is key for shielded enemies, or to stagger your enemy.

You can switch your stance with some weapons such as the "Mordhau grip". This uses the handle of the weapon to knock off opponents armour.

Combat generally involves attempting to trick your opponent and attempting to read their movement. Trying to move into your own attack range, and moving out of your opponents. You can lean back slightly by looking up.

There's some other cheeky techniques you may see your opponents do such as jumping with an overhead swing to attack above a shield. I saw one YouTube video where he explains you can do some weird techniques with your movement/ducking which results in your character being very jerky which makes you hard to read and lowers your chance of being hit, or increases your own chance to hit. I saw some of this behaviour online with people looking and slashing awkwardly towards the floor.

Like many online games, I found my experience quite mixed. You have the usual games where people drop out over time especially if they are on the losing team. Then there's people getting bored and killing their own team members. Then the games where everyone is highly skilled and the newer players like me have no chance. I thought Steam had restrictions on names but I saw all kinds of filth in people's names. I suppose people will always try to be immature.

The large-scale battles can be pretty epic but I thought the choice of colours to represent the teams were problematic and it seems people have been complaining about this for years. It is Red vs Blue, but when Blue is covered in red blood, then they look like they are on the Red team. Some character configurations have more armour than others and therefore look more grey which can look bluish depending on the lighting on the map. Many times I was delaying before attacking, whereas in other situations I was hurting my own team-mates.

There's various game modes like small combat arenas, and massive maps with areas to capture. Some modes have asymmetrical objectives, like where one team's objective is to kill the royal targets. The attacking team starts by smashing up some water-wheels, then proceed into burning the market stalls, smash the walls of a castle, then storm the castle to assassinate the royalty.

There’s a Horde mode where you fight against waves of AI controlled enemies. With gold that you accumulate, you can buy new equipment to use against the stronger waves.

You can play offline against AI bots but you soon realise how simplistic they are, especially on certain maps. They tend to follow the same paths which means they bunch up at choke points. They can also get stuck at some parts of the map or just give up and stand still. Playing against the bots can give you some experience of the very basic mechanics and learn map layouts but unfortunately, you aren’t gonna obtain more than a basic skill level.

The game is a few years old so the number of players is dwindling. There’s been some recent promotions, and I picked this up in the Humble Bundle, so it might have had some boost to the player-base.

you got tha unfunny chud chat.
toxic community you say?
well I say face my joke build after joke build as he beheads you with a kitchen knife

Mordhau is easily some of the most fun I've ever had playing a video game. The combat has lots of depth and is satisfying to master. There's a lot of variety in the different gamemodes, and custom servers are a blast. But what you'll eventually come to realize is that the true fun in this game comes from dicking around: Creating stupid meme classes, throwing rocks at people, insulting your opponents mid-duel, gathering a horde of followers by spamming "follow me" and then jumping off a cliff and watching them all follow suit. You can join a group that gets together and runs around dressed in identical outfits shouting "aye" over and over again (if you play US West you'll know what I'm talking about.)

The interactions in this game are a blast, and the game is built for them: All of the voicelines give off some Monty-Python-esque ridiculousness. The character customization is filled to the brim with cosmetic options to pimp out your knight to be as ridiculous or awesome as you please. You can look up and down while emoting, or you can cancel them mid-animation in order to create ridiculous looking moves and expressions. The developers have consistently shown favorability to a third-party tool called "Frankensteiner" that allows you to fuck up your characters face to a ridiculous degree. They have even purposefully left in a harmless animation glitch called "Patchie Boarding" that allows you to make your character slide around, holding a big shield under you as if you were riding it like a skateboard. There is even a dedicated suicide button to make your character fall over into a ragdoll whenever you please. Mordhau knows how ridiculous it is, and it embraces it, resulting in this one game consisting of almost all of the funniest moments I've ever had playing a video game.

I'm the type of guy who would just throw rocks at people while playing this game. the fact that I could do that and still have a good time shows how cool this game is