Every once in awhile a modification for a popular game comes along, and everyone wants to play it. Its ground breaking, its fun, and it consumes all your fucking time. On top of all that, its usually free.
There have been some great mods floating around the internet of late, and there is a great modding pedigree for these games to draw from. Games such as Day of Defeat, Rocket Arena, Insurgency, Counter-Strike, Natural Selection, DOTA, and Enemy Territory are all children of the modification monster.
The latest mod that you’ve never heard of (but should really be playing) is known as Age of Chivalry. Every gamer has dreamed of a first person shooter style game—set in the medieval world—kind of like Oblivion, but without all the boring grinding and questing. Age of Chivalry is that mod—its all swords, poleaxes, catapults and bows and arrows; without all the annoying wizardry, spells and skill trees.
It’s a modification of the popular source engine, and it’s free via Valve’s groundbreaking gaming distribution system Steam (minus the cost of bandwidth to download the data files).
The gameplay is much the same as any team based death-match first-person shooter (or in this case, first-person slasher). Except there are some marked additions to the tried and true formula. For starters, the maps are objective based—much like the Battlefield series, when a team has successfully overrun or defended an area, the map ‘segment’ changes, and new challenges are presented. Some of them are pretty graphic, such as one team having to behead a certain number of peasants, while another has to charge into the castle to defend them before the time runs out.
Ah violence. Smother me with your sweet pixelated medieval embrace. Hit an enemy at the right angle, and you can lop their head off; aim a catapult right, and you can take out whole swathes of stampeding knights. It’s great fun.
True, it is a modification, it is rough around the edges. But that’s half its beauty—and unlike some of the forgotten mods on the scrap heap of gaming history, this one is regularly updated and patronised.
Age of Chivalry, go get it. So you too, can man the walls of Helms Deep (yes that is a playable map!) or bare your Scottish buttocks to the English, before crying FREEDOM, and charging to your doom. Glorious.
Rating: 7.5/10