izigame.me

First and foremost, you should buy this game if and only if you:

are very patient and want to play a game that is competitive and don't mind being crushed ruthlessly and endlessly by higher levelled players as you slowly improve.
don't mind spending plenty of time familiarising yourself with the very deep and unintuitive game mechanics.
have thick skin and are willing to immerse yourself into a notoriously toxic player base that is slowly dwindling by the day.
do not take this game too seriously, your mental health will seriously deteriorate if you try to do so to any degree.

I've been very fond of this game ever since it was released, and had so many unforgettable bouts of crippling laughter induced from the outrageously funny combination of witty voice-lines, ridiculous character customisations and ragdoll physics. This game has so much potential and the level of trolling that can be accomplished within it is genuinely hilarious, some players have mastered the emotes menu to a worryingly ridiculous degree that even with my 1000 hours of play time I am left mesmerised as to how long they must've spent memorising the key inputs to barrel out the perfect emotes for each and every situation. The interactions with these 'troll' players is one of the best things about this game and often leaves me reduced to tears in fits of laughter.
However - there are a few key elements holding this game back and regretfully I cannot recommend it. The developers claim to have made a 'fictional but realistic' world, when in actuality it is much more of the former and much less of the latter.

There is nothing realistic about semi-naked peasants out-running everyone on a medieval battlefield laying bear-traps, armed with nothing but a maul, crunching every head in sight with one-swing.
There is nothing realistic about being unable to actively block (without certain types of shields), the game only allows you to raise your weapon in defence to 'parry' for an abysmal 325 milliseconds.
There is nothing realistic about 'swing manipulation' (accels/drags/jpegs/wristy-twistys/wessex etc) which involves abusing weapon and character animations to bypass your opponents' correctly timed parries i.e. looking away from your opponent as you strike them, so that your weapon slows down or speeds up in mid-air depending on the direction you're facing. This results in absolutely ridiculous 'ballerina', 'spinning top/beyblade' style of fighting which is analogous to fighting a drunken brawler.
There is nothing realistic about the damage tables, a bare knuckle punch (with the brawler perk) deals 35 damage (out of a possible 100, meaning death) to a fully armoured helmet, whilst spear and maul stabs deal only 10 more (45) points of damage (which in and of itself makes no sense, how are those two weapons even remotely equal?), but if I find and throw a carrot at your head, it'll deal a whopping 55 points of damage .

The developers have also been notoriously slow at releasing meaningful content, failing to meet the demands of their player base in a timely manner. The game has grown stale for me and many of my friends that have thoroughly enjoyed our journeys throughout this game. Any feasible direction the game could have been taken in is seemingly somewhat conflicted with what the developers themselves want for their game to be - opportunities to grow and develop a competitive e-sports scene having been squandered at every turn.
Every now and then Mordhau calls back to me, but every time I boot it back up for a few games I'm left thinking that I'd have had more fun if I had just played Chivalry 2. I still want this game to improve and deliver on what it originally promised, a realistic medieval slasher... But until then, if you want a fun, chock full of meme-potential, simple brawler, and you don't meet any of the criteria I mentioned at the start of this review, steer clear of this game and buy Chivalry 2 instead.