Battle Cry of Freedom preview: A unique take on the Civil War

I recall stumbling upon funny Mount & Blade videos by accident. Just bored and surfing YouTube when one just popped up. I was also a bit taken back by the graphics. Mount & Blade Warband: Napoleonic Wars came out in 2012 and looked every bit of 2012.

Recently Flying Squirrel Entertainment has taken the formula and replaced the Napoleonic Wars with the Civil War, calling it Battle Cry of Freedom. Instead of Great Britain and France we have the Union and Confederacy.

The graphics didn’t do much for me in Napoleonic Wars, and they continue to do very little for me with Battle Cry of Freedom. Characters still look blocky to me. Movement isn’t as fluid as you expect from a game in 2022. Some of this might be due to the long development cycle the game has gone through. It took nearly 10 years to get Battle Cry of Freedom to a full release.

But looks aren’t everything, the style of game intrigued me. A shooter where reloading can take over 15 seconds, you have to be into that kind of gameplay. Having to build barricades to block incoming fire, having to carry an ax to chop down obstructions, all of this feels unique to the shooter genre.

Battle Cry of Freedom was recently available as a demo because of Steam Next Fest. The fact that the battles were going to have 250 people on each side, 500 people total, also piqued my interest. I can report that servers were stable, only having an issue one night, on a Saturday where connecting wasn’t instant.

I decided to jump right in, which is the only choice you really have. The game doesn’t have a single tutorial to speak of. You customize the appearance of your character and then just look for a match. Never having played a game like this it would have been nice to have some direction early on about what to actually do.

Finding my first battle was easy enough, and after a decent loading screen I was immediately put into battle. But before I could do anything my speakers were set on fire with the sounds of what I assume is classical folk music. It was blaring as others around me were using their mics to talk, I couldn’t understand a single thing going on.

Luckily the settings function was easy enough to find and turn the background music off. Having settled my first issue the game fell into place easily enough. Most controls are pretty rudimentary if you’ve played a shooter. Pressing R to reload. Right mouse click to zoom in, left to shoot, shift to run. I’m glad that they didn’t get fancy with most of the basic controls.

Gameplay starts slow. It doesn’t magically get faster, but you begin to understand the flow of combat as you continue to play. After my first two or three games I was not having much fun. I was barely killing anyone, did not know the massive maps, how to change my spawn, how to use my weapon as a melee weapon.

I had almost given up trying to understand how to properly play. The big turning point for me was reading the chat. It seemed I was not the only one struggling with certain aspects of the game. I was surprised by how welcoming the community was overall, being more helpful than most gaming communities are to newcomers.

I took a break and came back the next day and suddenly things clicked for me. Instead of dying eight or nine times before getting a kill, I had downed six people before my first death. My patience for hiding behind cover, popping up after I heard a flurry of bullets, was being rewarded.

I found when I was personally doing well I was having more fun than if my team was winning but I was having a bad match. Because you can have 250 people on a team it is very hard to be the person who wins that game for your side.

There are still a few issues I have with the game. Changing classes is somewhat of a mystery. When I go to change I find that it works about half the time. The other half of the time I find myself still playing the class I was when trying to switch.

It would have been nice to have some pointers about what to do early on, especially when it came to using my weapon in the melee mode. If you find that you’re just not getting the hang of the game give it a little more time. Eventually you get better and better.