Half Sword

I put several hours into Half Sword expecting a gimmick dressed up in chainmail, and walked away with bruised wrists and a grudging respect for what this tiny Georgian studio is attempting. The core idea is deceptively simple and almost aggressively uncommercial: your mouse IS your weapon hand. Hold right-click and drag to swing a longsword, double-click to thrust, use both buttons together to half-sword a dagger through plate gaps. There are no canned animations to hide behind, no stamina bars with clean readouts, no combo menus. Every exchange is a live physics negotiation between mass, momentum, and reach. The three main modes on offer right now are Progression, the Abyss, and Free Mode. Progression is the meat: you start as a penniless nobody in the fictional city of Frankenburg and claw your way upward through eight fighter classes, earning coin and better kit along the way. Permadeath applies in Gauntlet, which feeds into the Abyss on death - lose there and your character is wiped. It is a brutal loop that creates genuine tension even in a 1v1 duel against a farmer. Single Combat duels and Spar sessions against mercenaries let you drill technique before risking your progression run, and a pre-fight training dummy is available before each bout. Free Mode lets you pick any unlocked rank and experiment without consequences, which is where most of the viral clips originate. Developers consulted HEMA practitioners, and it shows: guards, leverage, and targeting exposed cloth versus steel plate all matter in ways that most medieval games completely ignore. Here is where strategy-brain kicks in for me. Half Sword is not a reflex game. It rewards planning - reading your opponent's weapon, deciding whether to grapple, identifying the gap in their armor before committing. A fully armored opponent requires a completely different approach than a lightly clad brawler, and working that out mid-fight with a physics engine that does not telegraph its outcomes is legitimately thrilling. The historically accurate XV-century arms and armor are not just cosmetic: a halberd behaves differently from a messer, and using the wrong tool against a specific armor configuration will get you killed. The depth of decision-making here exceeds most games three times its size. But this is Early Access and the warts are real. Combat readability is a recurring complaint with some justification: limbs tangle, weapons lodge in bodies, and the AI has a habit of aggressive grappling that tips into frustration rather than challenge. Some community voices note that the Early Access build shipped with combat that felt like a step back from the long-running demo, and the developers have been candid about ongoing tuning. Performance on mid-range hardware can also be demanding given the physics load. The mode count is thin, there is no narrative campaign, and content depth lags behind the ambition of the underlying mechanics. A separate community issue worth flagging: the Ultimate Challenge mode carries a known crash bug that the developers are working to address. If you have played the free demo and it clicked for you, the Early Access release is the logical next step despite its roughness. If you bounced off the control scheme in the first ten minutes of the demo, the full game will not convert you. For everyone else, the demo is still available and should be the mandatory first stop. The ceiling here, if the studio delivers on its roadmap, is genuinely exciting for anyone who has ever wanted medieval combat modeled with the seriousness it deserves rather than Hollywood choreography.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

Be the first to comment on Half Sword.