If you already own Chivalry 2 on the Epic Games Store (opens in new tab), you'll be able to participate in a public playtest of the horse update, called Tenosian Invasion, sometime 'soon.' The invaded and invading faction in question, the Ottoman Empire-inspired Tenosia, may ultimately be appreciated most for the horses they're bringing with them, but I think they'll also be liked for the domes, minarets, and splashes of gold, green, and blue they add to Chiv 2's map rotation, which otherwise features mostly Western European-looking fantasy castles and fields. I also rarely even get to enjoy the game, with servers down so frequently.I stood on a table and hucked books at the other team like a poltergeist who doesn't realize they've turned visible.

I still try to play a lot, and spend a ton of time waiting in lobbies and matchmaking, loading screens waiting to play only to be dropped in for a 2min fight and the game closes. This is an absolute failure to launch issue, and is choke holding this games' popularity even with its very devoted fanbase. Games crash and drop all the time, repeatidly joining the different games of 10-20 players instead of big games promised of 64, because the larger servers simply crash. Beyond just the objectively stupid friends list issues (in a large scale multiplayer game), the servers are down at least three times a week and barely supported when they are up. I have 5 other people on steam asking if they should buy this and im going to say no, because its nearly impossible to simply enjoy the game with each other if one person didnt buy it at the right place. This was found out after steam's 2h return policy that has stopped me in the past. This game was purchased for me by a friend when it became available on steam, after some troubleshooting and trying to find out why we couldnt matchmake or join a group at all, we learned its because there's two types of 'friends lists' and Chiv2 only accepted Epic Games' personal friends list. This game is an awesome fun hack and slash.BUT epic games has made it nearly impossible to enjoy it for more than the odd game, when the servers allow it. If you can get past the jank you can definitely have a good time playing this game, but in general I'd advice waiting for a good sale or just holding off the purchase altogether until technical improvements are made. If it weren't for the technical problems, this would be one of my favorite games to be released this year. I don't know how the game is still in this state after being 'beta-tested' by EGS for a year before Steam release. Sometimes at a fresh spawn you'll spawn looking bloody/burned even if you hadn't taken any damage yet. I customized my character to be helmet-less, yet I spawned in with a random helmet I hadn't chosen. I've also had some more minor visual bugs/problems. Ping naturally plays a big part in reaction based counter/riposte system. The poor gamer had over 200 ping in our duel, wasn't exactly a fair fight. I live in Northern Europe and I was paired with a player from South America in a 1v1 match. Sometimes you'll just be matched into servers with up to 200 ping. Matchmaking sometimes doesn't take into account your ping properly and I have found no way to set a preference for it. You can't back away from the game as a party if you would like to switch game modes, you'll have to reform the party every time. If you try to queue again from the main menu while the party is intact, you pull your friends from their active game into your next one. If you have to back to the main menu to reset, you can't join your friend who stayed in the game. This is especially bad because the technical issues mentioned earlier.

You can't join your friends if they're already in a game, everyone has to be in the main menu to start playing together. The maximum party size is 4 at the moment of review (although increasing the cap is apparently on the developers roadmap), which is laughable since the main mode's fights are 32v32. Only thing you can do is try and suicide with F10 and change classes/teams to fix this with a respawn, but it's unreliable. Sometimes after you die camera stays on your dead corpse while you respawn. On one of the maps, whole spawn waves are sometimes instantly killed because they spawn outside of the map bounds and fall into the water below. A bit cliché, but it is easy to learn yet hard to master - the skill ceiling seems infinitely high. There is some rock - paper - scissors type counters to different attacks/techniques, and the tutorial does a good job at introducing the combat systems. There's a great balance of stamina, reach and damage in the weapon system. Nearly every weapon feels deadly and viable.

Chivalry 2 roadmap