Alright so I was without internet this past week and figured I would try my hand at getting good at Exanima. My actual hours are closer to 70 than 11 as I had a LOT of offline time to play it and Steam didn't track because of no network connection.


Challenging Gameplay. Like real challenging at first. All your attacks are based primarily on momentum (Drag that mouse y'all) followed closely by hitting them with the proper edge/point of the weapon. For example if you're using a sledgehammer, you wanna hit em with the big heavy clobbering end, not the stick.

Awesome world and lore. So this game is supposed to be the trial/demo run for their big game Sui Generis which has a pending release date / development. It's the same world from what I've read and has a lot of cool lore tidbits, and with each major update they add more and more content. There's tons of little lore scrolls and books all over that give you a good idea of the history of this world from the eyes of its inhabitants. Not like "And in 300AD the crown prince killed his sister in a jealous rage" but more like "It's dark, I hear drums beating in the distance. I can feel my life coming to a close as the horrid beasts draw in. But damn it all if I'm going out like a coward!" It's like little snippets of peoples' diaries and it works really well in this style of game.

Performance! This game runs exceptionally well if you have anything resembling a rig built in the last 5-6 years. The engine does have some hiccups here and there (Unsurprising as the dev team built it pretty much from scratch) but overall I have had exactly one major crash in my time playing and that was due to some collision issues when trying to make a tower of chairs (I basically tried to break the game). Otherwise, as a whole I was getting 120+ FPS and no stutter at all the entire time playing.

There's a lot more I wanna write but I can't think of how to say it without spoiling anything so I'll just say it's an excellent game with very little drawback.


When I said it's challenging, I'm not joking. It takes a good time to get used to the combat and the movement/momentum of your character so some people who want just a medieval brawling game might be turned off by that. It took me a good 6 hours in the arena mode to get comfortable enough with the combat to last several encounters in a row.

It does have a SLOW development cycle. Given that the dev team is so small, expect major content updates to take between 6 months to a year, but they are typically very flush with content and the weekly dev diaries help to show their work along the way. If you are impatient and want new content asap, this may not be the game for you.


I give Exanima a solid 9.5/10 at the moment and depending on how the development goes over the next couple of years, I can optimistically see that number moving to a solid 10/10. If you are a fan of medieval combat, physics based combat, and generally challenging games then definitely give Exanima a shot. It's a fun time!