Hellish Quart

This feels like the sort of game where no matter what you say in a negative review, someone will say "skill issue." It's interesting but pretty cumbersome and unresponsive, and I don't really want to build this skill.

I really wanted to like this one. And I get it — the realism is the whole point. One clean slash and you're done. It’s gritty, unforgiving, and sharp (literally and mechanically). But… it’s just not clicking for me.

This is 100% a controller game. You can use a keyboard, but expect the learning curve to feel more like a cliff. The graphics? Respectable. The physics? Impressive. But the gameplay? Just not my type of duel.

Still, I can see the appeal for those who live for hyper-realistic swordplay. Me? I’m tapping out early.

4/10 — respect the vision, but not for me.

Liked the game at one point in time but not any longer really. Character balance is laughably bad, some fighters that are ridiculously slow for their style and some that are far too quick for the amount of reach and cutting power they have, Samuel being the worst offender IMO. Arcade mode boss fight is far too hard also, and while the ducat system is cool conceptually, the implementation makes them way too hard to earn and keep.

This fails to mention that the game has been in development for years now and progress is painfully slow. I'd skip this one personally.

amazing game with great gameplay. the only improvements that i would like for the game is the ability in training mode to fight against AIs playing random characters. it would also be nice is the dash input attacks could be used mid dash to cancel the rest of the dash

One of the coolest and unique fighting games that i have seen, tiny bit quirky in some aspect but fun nonetheless. i wish nothing but the best for the dev and i hope you guys keep working on the game.

I was excited at first. But after 2 hours, hmm, I dont know.
But I will give it a new try after the latest updates.
It has some potential and maybe it will be better with controls.
Play it on keybord however, is crap.
Fencing physics are OK and pretty simple to learn but very limited to each character. And I think game creators always should strive to give the player options, if you wanna fight as man or wife.
However, I still recommend the game if you had a bad day at work and feel you just wanna destroy somebody over and over again with the few same attacks over and over again and probalby die a few times to, due to some game mystery you never saw.
Points: weak 3 out of 5 is my estimation so far, but it may reach 4 after some nasty updates.

It might be the only game of its kind in recent years. It's a bit rough around the edges, but also very fun so it's definitely worth a try

i got this game when it went on sale for $8.99. it feels like a medieval mortal combat / tekken, i like this game a lot it is good.

This is a ton of fun, much more so than should be expected from an Early Access title. Yes, I'm super nostalgic for Bushido Blade, but I'm also a lover of fighting games of all kinds and this one really stands out for all the right reasons. I can't wait to see how it turns out when it's finished, but I strongly recommend you don't wait until then to try it out.

as someone who has spent most of his conscious life admiring swords and a good chunk of my teenage years and adulthood learning and studying blades and HEMA and such (mainly an italian rapier fighter with a bit of basket hilted broadsword under my belt) this game feels like an incredible representation of how chaotic and unpredictable a sparring match can be, how fast and furious it can be or on the other end as slow and careful as it can be, and anywhere in between, no matter how experienced a fighter you are whether it's irl or in this game, you can never truly predict how a round is gonna end up. all in all if you like swords fencing history etc, this game is for you (also special side note that there's a fighter that uses HAMA techniques lmao good touch, you never hear about African swordsman-ship)

4 years later and they still dont have proper pc controls. you literally get a message starting the game telling you to grab your controller yet its a pc game released on steam...

I wish I had thought twice before buying this game because I have a damn Intel UHD graphics card🙏. But the game is sick even though it's in early access. Maybe some bugs, but it's still solid. Definitely recommend it

What a great game! It is in EARLY RELEASE, so the game is far from finished, but it is very playable and a load of fun. A smooth design and an attractive setting, with diverse and entertaining characters. 17th Century Poland is just so niche. I love it. This is certainly a labor of love for the developers. Aside from creating a great game, they deserve the support if only for their cleverness in doing something actually interesting. Highly recommended.

This game is practically one of a kind. It's a great feeling when you exchange attacks and insults with another player.

Great, simple and brutal.

The controls feel awkward and unresponsive. There are loads of spelling mistakes and no English voice over. It's not a particularly good looking game either.

I've been really enjoying this game so far.
I decided to get some new experience, bought a gamepad and was searching for a game to play with a friend from time to time.
I looked at all them anime fighting he showed me and then I remembered about me seeing some videos of this game long time ago.
I saw the discount as well and immediately bought it.
What can I say? I don't have experience in fencing, but after playing this game I have an urge to buy wooden swords / sabers and go fight with my my friends IRL. As for the game -- it's good. I guess it's not fair to scream: that's a masterpiece, 10/10 -- the game is still in early access. I'll highlight what I think are good and bad sides of this game.
Bad: even tho it might seem minor -- fighters have different stances, with either left or right shoulder upfront. The thing is -- there's no button to change the stance, you have to do it for example by doing a certain attack, that changes the stance, there's just no other way.
- there's no multiplayer yet -- it might be an immediate NO for some people.
As for the good: basically everything else.
looks extremely realistic
different weapons, characters with similar weapons using different styles (like, 2 characters might have a sabre, but they use it differently)
physics is good
graphics is good
they even have 1st person mode!
I like that there's no BS like magic etc. One hit -- and you might be dead. That's how it goes.
Of course the game is still in early access -- I expect more characters to come (the new character just dropped a week ago before this review)
more stories and a campaign
possible multiplayer? Who knows?

I would like devs to improve the AI in duels and maybe come up with some game modes etc, so I'm not gonna get bored if I play alone.

conclusion -- if you look for a realistic fighting -- look no further, simple as that. I do understand that this game is still in early access, this is probably not gonna be your main game in the library, but it's extremely fun to play against friends. Also, played via STEAM REMOTE -- works as charm! Also, no DLCs for characters (yet). Awesome. Wish we had more games like this.
Keep up the good work, devs, I wish all the best to this game's future.

dodge button should be a separate button, make keyboard controls use the mouse to attack, and add online pvp and this game would be amazing

Unfair against players.

Being touched or twice and it s a loss. Which is fine however in story mode this rule doesn't apply to npcs.

Best historical fencing sim there is. That may be due to it being the ONLY historical fencing sim, but that doesn't make it any less great. Buy it, you won't regret it! Best early access I've ever played, as each new content update is like a little gift that keeps on giving =D

the story mode walking is bad but overall its pretty good. its like mortal kombat midevil

its a good game, cant wait to see what the final result looks like

I adore this game, I think it's awesome! The combat is incredible and the game-play is sublime. However, I cannot stand the arcade final boss's inflated difficulty. From the jank from of him simply avoiding your block by moving right in your face so you cannot fight back, to the fact you only have two lives while he has three phases, to the fact that the boss has a final phase with both you and him only having one life instead of the standard three, and If you die? it's right back to the start of the boss fight, removing all the hype you build going up to the final phase. and honestly making me only play for short periods because as soon as I realize I have to do the same op boss again I just lose all will to keep playing and play something else. I love this game, I really do, but until something is done about the unforgiving boss fight, I can't fully get into it.

this is a souls like game with challenging boss fights and a vast open world

I wanted to like this game. It has a certain charm. It reminds me of the double dragon fighting arcade games. However I'm not sure how realistic it is.
I'll admit I didn't follow the instructions too easily, so I quickly degenerated into mashing buttons just like I did with double dragon in the 1990s. Perhaps this game will develop, but for me as is this game was a refund.

Props for the developer for continuously working on this game, but it's not what's sold on the tin. The game is entirely composed of the worst menus you have seen in your life and the combat just felt like button mashing. The ragdolls are cool though. I have full faith it'll become better in the future, but if what you're looking for is a deeper combat experience as opposed to just historical accuracy, this isn't it yet.

A game with a lot of potential:

Some pretty cool fight mechanics with some glaring flaws. So, where to begin . . .

-For one, the game instructs you that if you're pressing no buttons nor are you in the middle of an attack, your character should block automatically. This does not always seem to be the case. Why does it work sometimes and not others? Man, I'm not sure, it seems arbitrary to me.

-Hit registering is kind of jank sometimes. I buried my ax in a dudes face, twice in a row, and it played the squishy "you-just-buried-an-ax-in-this-guy's-face" sound, displayed blood effects, and he killed me with one sword slash about 15 seconds later . . . amazing . . .

-Is it just me, or do developers who make fighting games always make the progression "harder" by disabling you and giving the opponent abilities you could never have access to, you know, instead of just giving them better and better AI? I swear this is happening here, which might explain my previous mention of burying an ax into some dudes face twice in a row while he was able to continue on to scratch me with a sword. Not to mention, one dude was able to consistently grab me and insta-kill me. If there is some counter for that, I haven't figured it out and the game never instructed me on it. But for real, having a bot spam an unblockable grab over and over again does not make for a fun game.

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With all that said, I'm going to encourage the developers to keep putting effort into this project. When everything is working properly, you have a fun game here. It kinda reminds me of playing Bushido Blade, which is a game I genuinely enjoy. I'll keep coming back to this every now and then, and I'll gladly change my review to a recommend whenever this game is cleaned up some.

out of all fighting games ive played i really like this one and i think it has a lot of potential, i recommend this only if youre willing to look past its flaws. i think the boss for arcade is okay but it cranks up that bs difficulty like any other fighting game would but i dont think it fits here. sometimes it feels like blocks dont work. bots doing that attack read thing where have that perfect move to counter and take you out exists here too, other than that this game is fun and when it gets fun it gets really fun. cant wait to see an online feature in the future hopefully

a fresh & fun breath of clean air (compared to all of the bloated franchises). soundtracks also matter.

9/10 The Soundtrack, Combat options and fluidity are always improving and are great for endless clip-worthy 1v1s.

Looking forward to the dual-wield character and hopefully more out-of-the-box ideas (WE HAVE ENOUGH SABERS, KEEP GOING OUT OF THE BOX).

Mods are great - hoping in future this game will include 2v1s and more.

Combat looks nice, fluid & immersive
But it still has its fair share of problems which causes unnecessary frustration

Heres what I sometimes had to deal with:

- Some attacks are initiated with a big delay or not at all
- Hit detection & mass calculation is off
- Attacks feel random since you cant aim for certain body parts
This often leads to situations where the enemy creates an opening and you end up striking his weapon instead of his vulnerable body part due to the inability to aim for specific regions
- Displayed controls are completely fucked
- I despise the auto-block system with every single cell in my body (feels a like throwing dice)

This is without a doubt, the best fencing/sword-fighting game currently available on any platform. Still being developed but the game-play mechanics and animations are the best I've ever seen.

Note to devs:
+ Fix animations - If struck down, people with rapiers drop a new sword instead of what they're holding
+ Ducats - provide a breakdown of the ducat earnings and why (hit % , health lost, etc.)
+ Story mode - make the tutorial a part of the story to extend the campaign length organically and so we can learn over intervals/missions instead of in one go at the start.

I played this game one week after it launched, and didn't play for years. It's great to see how much work has gone into it. A story mode with cutscenes and animations is insane, I remember when the only mode was vs. CPU. Great work!

This has potential to be one of my favorite games of all time. Absolutely love the gameplay.

One thing I would love to see added would be the chance to strike your opponent down after you win a round, something like the "finish him" part in a mortal Kombat game - or even in like the flash game gunblood which allows you to continue shooting even after you win your duel. I think that would be super cool to see in a game like this. Or maybe the addition of a fight to the death mode.

Can't wait to see more characters/missions/arenas etc etc.

Found this game due to it's amazing soundtrack. Gameplay proved to be very fun as well.
And there's even a story mode! Story itself is unfinished, but even in it's current state it is very interesting.
I also finally understood why people enjoy using controllers thanks to this game.

The only desire I have is that the true tutorial was it's own option, separated from campaign, with tutorial's chapters available for replay and practice separately of each other. Because for me most stuff was easy, but parrying is hard and I'd like to replay those lessons as much as I need to understand the mechanic well.

while a simple premise this game is really fun while having a frustrating difficulty jump. the skill ceiling of this game feels really good and i can't wait to play more and get better

TLDR: I am addicted to this game, I enjoy it. But I also mean everything I say below. Cognitive dissonance:

At first glance, this game seems really cool; reading about the mechanics in the tutorials makes you think "Whoa, this actually takes timing and skill, this isn't just a button-mashing game." As it turns out, it's basically a button-mashing game. The controls and mechanics don't work as advertised. For example, your character is supposed to block automatically, whether he/she is standing still or moving...this simply isn't true. I've been hit by human and AI players numerous times while simply standing or attempting to move away from my opponent. The lack of a consistent blocking mechanic is a big problem. Furthermore, there never seems to be any consistency in terms of how quickly your character responds to control input. Sometimes it's lightning-fast, but most times it's frustratingly slow. There are tons of combos in this game--why? Your character gets exhausted after swinging the sword a dozen times, and attacking your opponent with more than a couple swings opens you up to getting inexplicably whacked. Winning fights comes down to either 1) spamming a single key/button at the right time, as your opponent is swinging (and hoping your character responds), or 2) smashing as many buttons as possible while moving around and hoping for a quick victory. This is not fun. Skill is an illusion. Character response is slow and inconsistent to control inputs. "Fighting" in the game is no more interesting than rolling dice over and over again. When I press "X" or "Y" or "A" or "B" on my controller, I should get an immediate response from my character. But I never do. It's like playing through persistent lag.

Despite all this...I would still recommend it.

Tournament mode please and cant wait to see the finished roster!

Excellent job by 2 developers making a passion a reality.

game is good fun but needs online, thats mainly the reason I'm disappointed.
That's just how it is nowadays, hopefully they will allow us to show them it can be a success.

Not played much of the game but just fyi to the devs. TYGH for main attacks is incorrect. RFVEGC are all acceptable options.

You ever played Bushido Blade? this game is similar to that but more realism into it

really enjoy the game. wish after five years theyd make more progress on the story besides chapter one

great game, especially watching a one-handed rapier hard block a zweihander

This game is NOT A VR GAME! It's a controller based combat fighting game (think Xbox controller with soul caliber style fighting game) The only VR option is you can view the game through your headset... if that classified as a VR game then Cyberpunk 2077 would be considered a VR game. Please re-categorize this game it's very misleading. This should never be listed in the VR category.

I thought I was getting an amazing physics based VR fighting game like Blade and Sorcery and what I got was historical a soul caliber button & joystick side scrolling fighter.

VERY Misleading marketing.

Massive potential here but feels like the outcomes are a bit random. Looks super good though!

A game that can't find it's identity about being realistic or not.

This game has a lot of promise and if you use the old version available in the beta section (2021) the combat flows nicely and would in theory with the current day improvements be an improvement.
But as stated in the title the game can't seem to figure out what it wants to do.
Physics based sword combat exists, grappling exists which is fantastic.
However characters are balanced entirely around this idea of being friendly to multiplayer and the scope of the characters in the game. This is where things fall apart entirely and huge inconsistencies start showing up.

Characters and their styles will be balanced as stated above and not as one would expect those weapons and styles behave in real life. Some practitioners will get gassed out with 2-3 swings while others will stand there and whirly bird their swords like a helicopter endlessely. Some have quick animation recovery times, others get stuck in self staggers. Some characters will fall apart with a block on the lightest of swings but others will tank a full force swing from full extension. The list of inconsistencies goes on. The biggest gripe here being that the reason for a character being good is arbitrary when the core mechanics expect you to expect realism.
So it's a janky simulator but only where physics and surface level sword fighting is concerned. And where fighting is concerned it becomes a tekken / bushido but only taking the best of those and mechanically executing those horrible.

So you say so it's a multiplayer game and to which the developer says: no it's not and you will use parsec and steam remote to play multiplayer because it's unfeasible. So you say it's a PvE game and I say: no it's not because if you force the game into slow mo you will watch the simulation of the AI reveal that it can and will input read. And it can and will execute defence and offence not on the principles you're constrained to but by a seperate subsystem which lets it script it's next move directly. You'll notice this in sword clashes and feints where the AI compared to you has the ability to move at a rate of 3-4x your speed upon switching the attack or block. You're constrained to inputs and animations, they can chain and switch them.

To really sweeten the brown cake this game prides itself on auto-block. Saying, "no never" to a block button but making blocks one dimensional and so player agency about defence in a realistic sword fighting game is left to:
- Don't be attacking
- Don't be off axis (good luck when half your attacks are tied to 2-3 directional inputs to execute and therefore degrade you moveset into single face button inputs)
- Don't be in long guard

Don't magically be in the wrong place at the wrong time because a bunch of the characters will ignore your block and slice your guard anyway because again you have no agency in your defence and a lot of the sword weight and "PhYsiCS" of footage you see from 3 odd years ago have been worked almost entirely around a few keystone interactions.

It's a novelty of a thing. Buy it to see something akin to a cool tech demo. There are early editions available through steam if you liked what you saw from footage from 2021 (you get one version from that era available) so that combat is available.

I couldn't recommend this to anyone looking for a realistic HEMA sim nor a decent HEMA game.

I got to 14th on the leaderboard for the survival mode though so... Sword go bonk and mo cap though I guess.

UI/interactions and key binding with mouse is especially bad and super janky.
if this game is on PC, it should not force me to play with controller.
I booted in today, and was struggling even just to get out of the keybinds menu because everything is so unintuitive. The reason i was there in the first place is that i couldn't even get past the character selection despite hitting virtually every button available to me. I was stuck on selecting a character variant, and changing keybinds evidently didn't change anything. Uninstalled.

One of the more frustrating games I've played in a while, so if that was the goal, good job.

Good game, The physics are fun and i like how many moves there are

Love this game so much, the realism and skill honing, only drawback is the lack of an online mode to play against other people, I get bored playing against ai bots because after a while they become predictable. I know the this has been answered before by the devs stating that it's still a small community and they want it to remain a game to be remembered for years and not one to be forgotten with and online mode ruining it, but that is far from the case, an online mode will actually take it to new heights and build a fan base of competitive players trying to see who's best and that's what we love as gamers

Bought the game expecting some skill to be put behind the fighting and there is none (Most unrealistic swordplay ever) not only that but their is no defensive strategy the game tells you to back up to block and or avoid getting hit which is laughable they must've paid the people who reviewed it positive I played for 68 minutes then refunded.