Mordhau Review (Skullhunter79)
It's a fun game but the decisions made by it's development team are baffling.
As a new player, having just finished the tutorial and taught the basics of a very complex and in-depth combat system, you will go into your first match against players who have played the game for literal thousands of hours.
There is no matchmaking system; unless you play the ranked 1v1 duels mode, you'll never be able to experience the full 48v48 or 64v64 matches against players of your own skill level. You'll go whole matches getting no kills, learning nothing, just running in and dying to things you don't understand. It's deeply unfun, and the fact that the development has just let the game die because of this, and other issues, is frankly baffling. I don't believe they know what it's like for a new player playing their game.
The community is very toxic, chat is a cesspool. I wouldn't recommend engaging with any of it.
The game itself is very fun. It has a deep and complex combat system, a lot of customization of your in-game mercenary; with a myriad of armour choices, emblems, colours, the colour and texture of the metal, and only a few pieces of armour are only accessible through DLC. There are a ton of different weapons to choose from, from little knives to massive waraxes and polearms. Your mercenary is entirely your own; you can even play as a ranger, a support role with fire bombs, smoke bombs, or medic bags to help your team, or an engineer who builds fortifications and mobile spawn points. It has a lot of options in gameplay and it all feels relatively equal so long as you're fighting someone of the same skill as you.
There aren't very many maps, but they are very fun and all feel distinct from one-another.
The two main gamemodes are Frontline and Invasion. Frontline is a back and forth tug-of-war style game, where the team holding more objectives than the other drains the other teams point pool.
Invasion is an attacker vs defender style game where one team must assault a series of objectives and the other must defend them. Invasion is fairly unique in that each map has new objectives to overcome in different ways, like pushing a battering ram to the enemy gates, burning down their village and killing the villagers, killing the enemy warlord, destroying the enemy water-wheels.
New content is released very, very slowly and in tiny batches. A single new map at a time, a few new pieces of armour and weapons, some bugfixes.
It's not a welcoming game, it's not fun for the first 50-100 hours, it's toxic and the developers don't seem to have any clue it's happening or don't want to fix it. It has some very fun aspects, the combat, the customisation, the feel of the different game modes. In it's current state it's a dying game, it's not fun for a new player, and I doubt this will ever change. This game once had a peak player count of 60,000 yet the developers squandered the opportunity they were given, they've had years to take any measures to prolong the life of their game or improve the experience for new players and haven't.