I learned about this game thanks to an Angry Joe video. Apparently he & I share a love for old timey battles. This game is still marked as being in early access, but is much higher quality than most Steam games using that moniker.

The fact it's still early access could be because the usual reason of avoiding criticism, but I've also heard through the grapevine there are more features the developers, Campfire Games, are hoping to add. The ones I hear the most are adding artillery & cavalry units and creating a Commander mode. Campfire does seem to be actively improving this game, so we'll see if they can fulfill those promises.

The music is sparse here, but the menu music is pretty neat. It's a cinematic remix of old marching songs. The game doesn't look half bad either. The battlemaps feel like real places with decent textures, that freaking cornfield is like a thick fog, you lose your unit easily. The character models look great and you get a mix of unique uniforms for the different regiments. You are in a first person prospective and when you look down you can see your legs. That walking animation does look a little odd though, like you're leaned way back walking like Shaggy.

So, I should mention what this game is. It's a MMO game set during the Civil War. You play as either a Union or Confederate soldier. I would not call this an FPS or action game though, it is much more a Napoleonic warfare simulator. You will likely play as a grunt in the regiment. It is important to stay with your unit and work as a team to fire on the enemy. Your side loses more moral when you run off on your own & die, referred to as "Ramboing". Besides, it's much cooler to stay in formation and fire off a few volleys, watching the wall of smoke dissipate, I find it cool. When you've got Johnny Reb on the ropes you can fix bayonets and charge in! The melee combat is pretty basic, and is where I get killed the most. And I like to treat my deaths like how they did in the beginning of Battlefield One. When I respawn it's as a new soldier on the battlefield.

The guns you have aren't meant for frantic CoD shooting anyways. You've got percussion cap muskets that take some time to reload. I would argue it's almost a little too slow & a trained soldier would be a little less lackadaisical about reloading, but it could also be a balancing issue thing.

In pursuit of being a realistic simulation, there's no score you earn for killing players or leaderboards, the guns aren't that accurate anyways. The HUD & waypoint markers are extremely minimal and only pop up when you hit the T button, though sometimes it glitches out and they don't appear. For most time, all you see on screen is just the battlefield in front of you. It adds a fun tension to the game. I couldn't always pick out where the enemy was and sometimes I couldn't tell if those people moving around 70 yards away were friend or foe. Again, you get a feel for what it was like to be a soldier back then.

The other aspect that makes you feel like a soldier of the 1800s is the commander aspect. Along with most people playing as grunts, there is usually one or two people who play as the officers. As a grunt, your job is to follow their orders. How they pick who plays as the officer I don't know, I think the requirement is just to have a microphone. I've 'served' under some really good officers with some good squadmates where we won battle after battle, I died rarely, and had fun. I played with one officer who was good, but took it way too seriously, a "Stitch Nazi" as they are called in the Civil War reenactment world. And finally, there were some officers that were just trolling around. They usually just wanted to bayonet charge everything. In all these instances I felt like these were situations real Union boys found themselves in. Working under good commanders or bad ones, knowing their recklessness will likely get you killed.

All in all, I really enjoy playing this game. It nails that authentic feeling and looks decent. It feels fun to work together creating firing lines, and you meet some interesting online personalities. This game has already accomplished a sturdy playing mode for an early access game. If you are a fan of the Civil War or pre-1900 warfare and want a well done simulator I highly recommend this. My only caveat is it is a pricey game, okay if you're a huge fan of this type of game, but if you've a casual interest, maybe wait for a sale.