I'll be honest. I want there to be a player base for this game. I know it's got a shaky history, especially with those who were expecting Torn Banner Studios to make a "true" follow up to Chivalry: Medieval Warfare, but taken apart from that context, this game is, at least to me, more visually interesting, and far more enjoyable an experience. Now, it does have major issues with Ping, some graphics bugs that need to be fixed, and the Devs REALLY need to work on better server connectivity overall, but even with those issues, I feel a great fondness for Mirage.

I enjoy the intregation of combat spells, traps, and projectiles into the combat, I love the simple but fun act of parkouring up a wall to flank an opponent, and I LOVE the colors, the art style, and the map design. It's nice to see something visually different in the hack and slash action genre, and to play a game that just feels... fun. I got my butt kicked several times and still enjoyed the experience, simply because of how unabashedly silly and yet solid it felt as a whole.

The fact that this game is being shunned, (as far as I can tell), simply because it was not what was initially expected, fills me with frustration. How many sword fighting, fireball slinging games, drenched in far Eastern, Arabian Nights psychadeIic glory, are there? Almost none. I long for warriors to return en masse to these arenas and halls and canyons. I long to wall run through the world, cutting my foes down with technicolor laser beams and cold etched steel, but there's not a soul to be found on the servers anymore. Please folks, give this game a try. It really is fantastic, and deserves better.

You do realize that down-voting a game on the grounds that "nobody plays it" only helps to guarantee that nobody will play it, right?

I hope this is not the final nail in the coffin for Torn Banner, because we don't have a bad game here. The first-person combat system which is in Chivalry is also in Mirage. You still choose your warrior, weapon, and armour before games, only now smoke and oil pots are replaced with spells. Spells vary from character to character as do their play styles like in Chivalry. You can parkour up walls to a certain extent, so movement has become more fluid. The combat system, as well as the graphics have been improved. The world is set in a arabic fantasyland, as opposed to Chivalry's medieval setting.

So what went wrong? They upgraded the graphics, improved the mechanics, added new features, and wrapped it all in a brand new skin that none of us had ever seen before. One major factor I believe to be was the spells. Yes it might have added another layer to the combat and possibly made things more interesting, but it was that raw medieval warfare which was Chivalry's strongest suit in the first place. Choosing to forget the fantasy aspect which is so commonly linked to medieval lore and focus on the knight on knight battles is where Chivalry excelled, so for them to pull a 180... let's just say it didn't go down all that well with a lot of people to start off. This combined with it's lack off advertising ensured that not only would this game not acquire a new audience, but it's original audience wouldn't be converting over either.

As much as I want to, I just cannot recommend this game to anyone. You are constantly being forced to use melee over magic, and if you are going to melee you may as well play the older game Chivalry. The player base is dead, there are only ever 1-3 servers that actually have people on it. With a playerbase this dead you would atleast expect an offline lan mode with/without bots so you and the 4 of your friends that also got sucker punched into buying this can atleast enjoy a few games without 300 ping but no. Nothing. Another win for Chivalry that has these features.
This game should have been labled as early access, because as it is now its an unfinished game. Paying more for this than Chivalry is unacceptable.

It's a very fun game but here's a list of the things that need improvement :

Offline lan with/without bots needs to be added
Stamina bars deplete too slow and recharge way too fast. Spam for the win.
Team damage is way too little so people spam M1 (wide attack) with almost 0 consequences.
Some of the loading times are insanely long.


This review may seem quite brutal, but I just really want to see this game do good.

Make this game Free to Play you silly goofs

The game looked interesting at first glance: more variety than Chivalry in classes, added spells, and parrying all types of attacks. However, the game suffers a few flaws.

First and foremost, there is no matchmaking queue or any reason to stick a game out until the end besides rank XP and cosmetics. There aren't many players (at the time of this review the peak player count is 190) so matchmaking seems infeasible, but still it would be nice to have matchmaking with similar skill levels. Since there is no way to know how skilled your teammates and opponents are or get into matches with similarly skilled players, the game can be very frustrating or unsastisfyingly easy. There are few times when a round is actually evenly matched.

Beyond this, there is not much in the game to encourage teamwork. There is no team voice chat for strategizing, only all chat for voice. There is no minimap either just little triangles to show you where teammates are but they don't specify distance either. If your team is spread out, it is hard to tell where people are since their triangles can be in all directions and not immediately visible when looking a particular direction. It would be a lot better if there were systems in place to encourage teamwork, since it is common for a team to sit on the objectives as a full team and never really get pushed off for the entire duration of the game while the other team trickles in one at a time--not realizing that their teammates are all dead. This is a tough situation since even getting 2v1'd is a very one sided experience, and there are no real escape abilities of the characters. If you find yourself battling 2 opponents, you are pretty much dead with no way out.

Further, there are no alternative objectives on the map such as health packs, cooldown reductions, speed boosts, etc. that provide battle incentives. The only similar objects are small "Jinn" that drop when an opponent dies which gives a small cooldown reduction and a small health bonus.

As far as the spells go, they are okay with most of them being pretty obvious and not really offering much complexity. For example, there is a boulder, a whirling swing move, a few jump-then-slam moves, and some wide range magic spells. There is one spell that could be used as an escape, Phase, but it is very short in movement and time active. The spells themselves have very long cooldowns of 10 to 30 seconds, even if you kill an enemy and pick up a Jinn you only get about -3 seconds, which is tiny compared to the actual spell cooldown. Often, this translates to killing the first enemy with spells and then any subsequent enemy must be killed with only your weapons. For a game that is trying to add abilities and variety to the PvP slasher genre, this feels like it's tacked on to the format rather than being really integral to combat. Personally, I think the combat would be more interesting with a more diverse set of spells that aren't all just damage spells (aside from like 3) that have lower cooldowns and maybe a little bit less damage. Escapes and manueverability spells would really add to the game.

Speaking of manueverability, the only way to sprint is to hold run until it automatically makes you sprint. There is no toggleable sprint, which is a shame. For a game that already has a stamina bar, it would be really nice to have a stamina-based sprint and a roll/side-step in the game on every character. This would make combat a lot more interesting especially when getting outnumbered.

Finally, the tutorial is really cryptic. There are no HUD elements that let you know if you are parrying or riposteing correctly. There is apparently animation cancelling in the game to chain attacks together, but it is not clear when you do this correctly in the tutorial or in the game because there is no feedback. It also doesn't seem like the animations get very much shorter at all. It would be nice if there was a mode that teaches how to do this correctly with feedback and an indication in game when you animation cancel.

The maps themselves look pretty good though, as well as the cosmetic items.

In sum, there are a lot of things wrong with this game that make it seem clunky and basic. There is certainly depth to the game as far as the weapon combat goes, but the spells don't add much to that. The trailer shows a lot of spell use, but in reality they are few and far between since the cooldowns are so long. However, the two most important criticisms in my opinion are the lack of a rating-based matchmaking system and the lack of a toggleable sprint and roll/side-step. The former makes matches very one-sided pretty consistently since you can play against total noobs or beta veterans and the latter makes combat very parry based and not at all reliant on positioning and disengaging/re-engaging combat.

If they would add these two things and rework the spells to feel less like they are tacked onto chivalry, this would be a really fun game, however, without these I cannot recommend this game at all.

Dead game.

THE “BEST GAME THAT ABSOLUTELY NOBODY PLAYS” AWARD

The combat is satisfying, the classes are fun, the maps are great and yet nobody plays it!

Also giving this game negative reviews purely because nobody plays it DOES NOT HELP IN ANY WAY, SHAPE AND/OR FORM.

All in all I find this game quite fun, and if you're a fan of timing based, free-form melee combat I definitely suggest it! I'll be going through some of the pros and cons of the game below, as well as any personal gripes or issues I have had thus far:

Pros:
-Great classes- All 6 of the classes are fun and satisfying to play, though some are have a larger skill gap than others. They all play quite uniquely as their weapons and abilities vary.

-Fun game modes- All 3 of the game modes are a lot of fun, My personal favorites being 3v3 Arena and 6v6 objective. 10v10 Team Deathmatch is also a lot of fun if you want to just let loose and do some killing without having to worry too much about tactics.

-Interesting colour palettes and aesthetics- Though some people dislike the games art style, I quite enjoy it, too many games are all greys and browns now a days!

-Simple but interesting maps- The maps play quite well, none of them are overcomplicated and balanced well enough that it would be difficult for a team to camp one spot for long. As objectives move closer to the defenders spawns things become much more intense and can lead to some really interesting comeback or draw moments.

-High Skill cieling- Combat between high level players is really fun to watch and play! Due to the removal of reverse overheads and the like Combinations of abiliites and normal attacks allow you to mix up the fighting in ways that players can still counter if they are quick enough.

Cons:
-Low player count- This is probably one of the biggest issues at the moment, one which can only really be adressed over time as the game gathers people that enjoy the mechanics and stick with the game rather than Rage quitting. Even with the low player count, I don't typically have much trouble finding or starting a server in peak hours, and simply hopping into an empty server often fills up pretty quick if there aren't any others up.

-Unbalanced teams can be frustrating- Due to how the game is balanced, full lobbies are a ton of fun, but when one team doesn't have as many players as the other (Be it caused by rage quitters, or simply uneven numbers in a server) it becomes very one-sided unless the handicapped team has people good enough to carry and make up for it. Team objective can be especially frustrating when you are a player down.

-Performance issues in 10v10- This is potentially an issue with my own setup (GTX 1070, Radeon 9590 4.7ghz, 16GB RAM) but I see a huge performance drop when servers have any more than 14 people. At 12 people I get about 60-70 FPS, and once any more than that join, it drops down to about 30-40 FPS, which in a timing based melee slasher such as this is basically unplayable. Turning down settings seems to make no difference, which causes me to suspect it is some type of CPU optimization issue, or bottlenecking on my end


All that being said, if you like the idea of a class based, Small team melee slasher with abilities and magic mixed in, I definitely recommend it. While some mechanics are similar to the games predecessor chivalry; Do not expect this to be chivalry 2. The small teams and abilities make it play more like Overwatch than chivalry, though the old melee slasher style combat is still present. I personally think it adds another layer of complexity, but there is definitely a lot of dislike and hate towards the game from the old CHiv community.

If you like melee combat, Team based gameplay, and magic, Don't let the Ex-chiv player hate train and the small population discourage you from buying. The community is small but pretty tightly knit, and always willing to answer questions and help new players get used to the gameplay and changes from Chivalry.

I will never understand how this game flopped so badly. Theres currently a single person playing it (according to steam charts). It was enjoyable, in a lot of ways similar to its prequel with tons of new fixes, items, and gameplay mechanics, but (im assuming) bad marketing and a lack of interest in advertising or fleshing the game out in other ways besides just releasing it on steam, were what contributed to it being absolutely dead not 6 months after its release. I want to reccomend it, but its an entirely online game...and literally, no exaggeration here, NO ONE plays it anymore.