Chivalry 2 is back with a self-explanatory Last Peasant Standing mode and Montcrux castle map
New update brings a Siege Crossbow to a swordfight
Medieval multiplayer clangfest Chivalry 2 gets a free Reclamation update today, the cherry on the cake of which - knob on the coronet? Prong on the portculis? Ah wait, jewel in the crown! - is new 64-player map The Reclamation of Montcrux, in which the rampaging Agathians attempt to overrun a fort held by the Tenosians, pitting petard against bombard, battering ram against ballista.
Gosh, that's a lot of medieval words. The translation is that one side has to run up the hill screaming while the other side lobs big balls of fire at them. Bash your way into the castle and you'll be able to stop the aforesaid rain of fireballs, though you'll still have to worry about getting dinged upside the headbone by dudes in plate. Onward, friends to the next paragraph! We have nothing to lose but our limbs!
Fortunately for the attacking Agathians, the update introduces a new Siege Crossbow, brandished by the Crossbowman subclass, whose bolts not only deal "notable damage" to non-objective siege weapons and constructables, but also pierce through them. It's the railgun of the 1300s! Let's see how you deal with this, Tenosian dogs! Do bear in mind, though, that Siege Crossbows have a lengthy reload time. If you narrowly miss somebody's eye with one while they're charging at you waving a claymore, you're probably not walking away from that skirmish with your head.
Chivalry 2, of course, is a "class-based" game in terms of more than just character loadout. The Reclamation update also introduces Last Peasant Standing, in which you get to play a fragile muck-raker scrambling to gather weapons from the map itself and murder other peasants on behalf of either the Agathians or the Tenosians. It's divided into rounds - win five and you win the match. There doesn't appear to be a victory option dedicated to shaking hands and rising in revolt against the silly bluebloods, but perhaps that's something you can bring about in-game.
Last and least, the update re-introduces the Desert map as a Free-For-All map, and implements a host of smaller fixes, of which you may read more on the Steam page. There's also a new campaign pass with which to unlock fancy armor, heraldry and... Warhammer skins? They buried the lede there.
Anyway, all of this is an overdue reminder for me personally that Chivalry 2 is on Game Pass and that I owe it some attention, as a man who often bangs frying pans together while closing his eyes and losing himself in visions of the Battle of Grunwald. In our Chivalry 2 review, Brendan "Knight of Flowers" Caldwell described it as "a gore-soaked multiplayer battler with tons of humour", the key joke presumably being that it's called "Chivalry". Rick "Pendragon" Lane wrote a Making Of last year in which the developers, Torn Banner, revealed that Monty Python is a big influence.
Little update: trollomat points out in the comments that the latest Humble Bundle includes Chivalry 2 together with Wildermyth, Paradise Killer, Disco Elysium and Spiritfarer, all of which are excellent if regrettably lacking in dismemberment systems.