Recent reviews by Randall

Mordhau is a great game but it's still in development. (Even though it's not sold as a beta)

The core gameplay is there and it's amazing but I can't wait for the developers to push more updates to it, which I'm sure they'll do.

I've had no experience with other games like it (Chivarly and the likes) but the fighting system in Mordhau is great, prepare your ass to get kicked a lot however as this game requires skills and every mistake is punishable.

Visuals are pretty decent, audio is good, music is good. I can run this game on a 2012 computer in 60 fps on medium settings so it's well optimized.

The 2 things I'd like to see them update in the future first are:

1) Better tutorials and a learn tab in game. Currently there's a very short tutorial in game that gives you the basic mechanics but that's no where near enough for you to get a grasp. Different training 'sparing' tutorials would be great against bots for example and also an extensive learn tab in game describing the differences between weapons/different attacks etc how much damage it exactly does. Currently there's just a brief overview of what each weapon does in the armory.

2) Custom servers that are not paid - currently if you want to host your own lobby in the game you need to pay a monthly fee, I have no idea why this is the case. This is the first time in a multiplayer game like this I see that you can't host your own lobby.

In my opinion everything else can wait - skins, new maps, new weapons, new characters, new game modes etc but these 2 things should be fixed as soon as possible to get more people playing.

One thing I'm surprised about is that this game is not free to play and doesn't have micro transactions for skins. IMO if this game was made by Valve it would've gone the CS:GO and Dota2 route and made crazy money by giving you the core gameplay for free and letting you buy skins ingame (that dont effect the gameplay), I could definitely see it going that way once there's a bigger player base and the game is fully fleshed out. I guess they needed the initial money from sales since it's not a big studio from what I gather.

Quick Thoughts

This was my first Tele-Episodic game and I will recommend it to people, even if you haven't tried these kind of games before.
I found the story captivating and emotionally fulfilling, though it had some minor flaws. The gameplay is for what the genre is decent.

Is this game for you?
Although I found that the game isn't particularly aimed at my demographic (Male in his twenties), I still think it was enjoyable. I definitely believe that the game is much more suitable for a teenager as I felt that it could've gained a lot if there was more mature dialogue scenes, violence and sex, not just for the sake of it but I really think the story would've benefited from it. It did tease those things a couple of times but that was it.

That being said, some of the immature decisions the characters make does fit them as they are after all teenagers so it didn't bother me too much in the end.I can still recommend it to everyone but especially if you're a teenager.


The story.


I'll keep this short since I do not want to spoil it for you.

This is the main ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ selling point of the game. The story is great, it will keep you on edge and make you buy all the episodes so you find out what happens. It greatly punches you emotionally .Had it not had such an emotional story and a roller coster of a ride the game would not be what it is.

The characters are for the most part great, I didn't really care for any of the main ones however. The ending is satisfying.

One of the problems I have with the story are that some of the 'side-plots' and decisions you make in the game around them really absolutely do not matter in the end. A lot of side story things that are displayed as in 'this will have an effect' later on really do not and in some cases you don't even ever see what your choice ended up changing so they're really filler material but this is a minor pet peeve as the main story is great and your choices do matter.

Many cases of illusion of choice as user HOTSPOT puts it.

The second problem is that the story is flawed and paradoxical in nature once you begin to think about it but I feel like you can easily get past that as that's a thing that a lot of fiction related to time travels suffers from, the point is that this is not detrimental to your enjoyment at all.

The Gameplay


The gameplay is decent for what the game is.. as I mentioned this is my first Tele-Episodic game and the only experience I've had was watching a stream of the Walking Dead Gameplay and I really felt that these games are boring and are only story telling based on that. Well this game is a little bit different and it might surprise you, it did surprise me.


There's a really cool element in it where you could reverse time and go back to alter your choices (that's what the game is basically based upon). This is really cool and not only does it tie in with the story perfectly and it makes sense but it also drastically improves your gameplay experience as you're not forced to commit to a choice and you can alter game as you go on.Absolutely amazing feature that was integrated flawlessly and I can barely see myself playing another Episodic game without it.


That being said, one thing that was annoying with the time travel mechanic is that sometimes you couldn't time travel back and immediately alter a choice you made which was a bit random.

In the game at certain points it is exactly explained why you can't go back in time and immediately change what you said and it makes sense but other times you're just immediately presented with a cut scene and then you can't go back.. without a warning.. while at other times you still just made a decision that will impact the whole game but you can just go back and rewind. So this made up for a somewhat mixed experience because at some points I was led to believe that I could rewind back what I just did/said and I would simply go for the wildest answer even though it's not the one I want but I'd end up not being able to reverse it, while at other times I could actually do that..I think a optional warning when things could or not be reversed might of helped or just more consistency.


Other than that feature however ,there's no much really for you to do in the game. The gameplay is somewhat repetitive. The main things you do is go back in time, talk to people and explore.



There are 2 main distinct mini challenges in the game.



The first one is to focus on photos. This is a very bad implementation and was really tedious and did not add anything to the table, it didn't make sense either and it was quite buggy so I really disliked it.



The other mini game was basically solving a puzzles out of the clues you've collected in episode 4 and connecting the dots or for example entering keycodes/passwords etc. This I found fun.


I would've enjoyed seeing a bit of a more interactive gameplay even though it's an episodic game, the time travel scenarios kind of expand in episode 5 which I liked a lot.

The other flaw is that you can't skip cut scenes at all, unless you just watched that cut scene. If you want to replay the whole game you'll have to re-watch all the cut scenes.. this is really putting me off from replaying the whole game and really diving deep in to the whole story and you can't even let the cut scenes drag as if you alt-tab the game will auto pause and it wont resume until you focus on it again.



There were a few audio glitches/bugs in the game while I played it but nothing major.

Technical Stuff
Anitmation and graphics are ok.

Voice acting is ok for the most part but there are times that it's not so great and you can barely recognise that it's the same voice actor.. so kind of a mixed bag.

Music is sometimes annoying and I ended up severely lowering it as I progressed. I just didn't feel the need of yet another cheesy alt-j song while the animations and transitions were playing and I like alt-j and most of the music that was played in it.


Price


Worth? Yea.. it's worth it for the 5 episodes.. You'll probably end up buying them after playing the first one. I didn't particularly like that you can buy the episodes separately or that it's sold episodically at all. I think the game should be represent it for what it is and not be split in episodes since there's no clousure until the very last episodes, the previous ones always end up on a cliff hanger (of course to sell the other ones more). The game would really be wasted if you don;t play it through.

I'll definitely play the new one as well.