And with more than 30 hours under my belt, I'm loving it. The combat system is, of course, the core of everything. And in another clever bit of design, you recharge these powers faster by doing things your class is good at and should be doing anyway, like getting kills with your charge attack as the furious raider or blocking attacks as the stalwart guardian. Even if you're not the best one-on-one fighter in the world, you can still make a world of difference in big encounters by blowing your war horn and giving a hefty area-of-effect heal to your side of the melee. I also admired that, within each class, special abilities tend to focus on supporting your team rather than simply making you better as a single combatant. And while you'll see plenty of people in chat moaning about archers being too powerful, it does require a lot of practice and good instincts to make the most of them. But the offensive monsters like the devastator and the crusader are a ton of fun. And shields, I found more often a burden than a boon. The skirmisher, who throws javelins, is supposed to be kind of a hybrid between a melee and a ranged class, but ends up just feeling worse at both than her specialist counterparts. There's a rogue class which gets a bonus to backstab damage, but I never really found that I could make the most of this in team fights or one-on-one.

I was a little disappointed I couldn't just go crazy mixing and matching, but I soon found that there are kits to support just about every playstyle I could imagine, from a deadly crossbow sniper to a frenzied, axe-hurling berserker. You can also unlock new primary and secondary weapons within each class, so there's a lot of meaningful progression to work toward. Rather than having you build out a complex custom kit with all the exact weapons and armor you want, Chivalry has 12 set classes divided into four archetypes, with four available at the start and the rest unlocked as you go.

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