Initially, I had a blast in Mordhau. Outside of a small handful of things that only pop up at an extremely high level of play and will likely be adjusted down the line, the mechanics have a very solid foundation and it was quite fulfilling starting at "easy to learn" and trending towards "hard to master" territory.

Unfortunately - and I say this as someone who's been happily gaming since the '80s - this game has the single worst, most venomous, vitriolic, toxic, hate-spewing, troll-ridden, and generally unpleasant communities I have ever encountered. This is not an exaggeration. I cannot think of a single worse community across the roughly eight berjillion hours I've spent playing games with other humans. No MMO, FPS, Fighting Game, RTS, ARPG, Monopoly on Family Game Night, nothing. Nothing comes close.

I normally wouldn't dream of rating a game poorly based entirely on the community, but, well, this is a recommendation. And I wouldn't recommend observing this community* through binoculars to anyone with a shred of hope left in humanity.

Of course, my great sin was enjoying the idea of the large pitched battles of the Frontline game mode. The exception to what I wrote here is if you like the idea of hanging out in duel servers. Most duel servers are fine and a great way to improve your play in never-ending 1v1 battles.

If do end up playing and you haven't played any of the 2½ other games that exist in this specialized sub-genre, just be prepared to spend, quite literally, dozens of hours to get a hang of the basics, hundreds of hours training your muscle memory to get gud, and then thousands of hours trying to figure out how to beat that one naked guy that showed up killed you 30 times in a row while avoiding your attacks using nothing but emote dance-fighting immediately after you thought to yourself "Hey, I'm getting pretty good at this."

Also, on the rather off-chance you have misophonia and decide to play this game, be prepared for "incessantly screaming foppish men" to suddenly become one of your triggers.

Initially, I had a blast in Mordhau. Outside of a small handful of things that only pop up at an extremely high level of play and will likely be adjusted down the line, the mechanics have a very solid foundation and it was quite fulfilling starting at "easy to learn" and trending towards "hard to master" territory. Unfortunately - and I say this as someone who's been happily gaming since the '80s - this game has the single worst, most venomous, vitriolic, toxic, hate-spewing, troll-ridden, and generally unpleasant communities I have ever encountered. This is not an exaggeration. I cannot think of a single worse community across the roughly eight berjillion hours I've spent playing games with other humans. No MMO, FPS, Fighting Game, RTS, ARPG, Monopoly on Family Game Night, nothing. Nothing comes close. I normally wouldn't dream of rating a game poorly based entirely on the community, but, well, this is a recommendation. And I wouldn't recommend observing this community* through binoculars to anyone with a shred of hope left in humanity. Of course, my great sin was enjoying the idea of the large pitched battles of the Frontline game mode. The exception to what I wrote here is if you like the idea of hanging out in duel servers. Most duel servers are fine and a great way to improve your play in never-ending 1v1 battles. If do end up playing and you haven't played any of the 2½ other games that exist in this specialized sub-genre, just be prepared to spend, quite literally, dozens of hours to get a hang of the basics, hundreds of hours training your muscle memory to get gud, and then thousands of hours trying to figure out how to beat that one naked guy that showed up killed you 30 times in a row while avoiding your attacks using nothing but emote dance-fighting immediately after you thought to yourself "Hey, I'm getting pretty good at this." Also, on the rather off-chance you have misophonia and decide to play this game, be prepared for "incessantly screaming foppish men" to suddenly become one of your triggers.