Shout, Shout the "Battle Cry of Freedom"
This is my favorite game in years--and no one plays it.
In high school I put hundreds of hours into Mount & Blade: “Napoleonic Wars.” This semi-mod multiplayer DLC expansion for Mount & Blade: Warband introduced me to the Napoleonic Wars and ignited my lifelong passion for Napoleonic history and musket marksmanship. The thrill of twenty second reloads beneath the blare of aggressive Beethoven cannot be beat.
My favorite game mode was always Commander Battle. Herein the player controls a regiment of twenty to fifty soldiers in a ten-on-ten battle. Bannerlord has this today, but 19th century technology makes for much more interesting maneuvering than gigantic melee brawls. Line shootouts and cavalry charges, smoke clouding the air, player-managed artillery, and no respawns: this is the experience that only Mount & Blade can deliver.
For the last decade, I've always come back to Napoleonic Wars. It is one of my favorite games of all time. But an eon has passed since its release, and it is mostly dead today.
So a hole remained in the genre of mount-and-musket multiplayer mayhem. It is therefore unsurprising that newer, prettier games have rushed to fill the gap.
The obvious direct successor was Holdfast: Nations at War. Holdfast is fine; its shooting is excellent, and I’m glad it’s so popular. But the lack of advanced melee mechanics ruins it, and it has no Commander Battle. For all of its huge battles filled with white smoke, I’ve never found it half as fun as the original “Napoleonic Wars.”
A slightly different take on this kind of game is the forever-EA War of Rights. Instead set in the US Civil War, War of Rights is a line battle simulator, with a heavy emphasis on local voice chat and roleplaying. I kickstarted the game eight years ago, and am sad to report it's received almost no new content since then.
Most engagements in WoR consist of 300-yard shootouts between ranks of Secesh and Yanks, where the resolution on my monitor is too low to actually render whoever I'm supposed to be shooting at. Your time will be spent reloading and firing off toward smoke clouds. There's no scoreboard or pop-up when you kill someone, so you'll never know if you’ve scored a hit. Because reloading is a simple animation--and not somehow mechanized with an active process--you're mostly doing nothing during this time except staring at your screen, hoping you don't get shot.
When you are inevitably shot, or blown up by artillery, it'll be from someone so far away you couldn't have possibly have seen him. Then respawn and do it all over again.
I enjoyed WoR approximately eight years ago when its alpha was first released. Its heavy emphasis on realism and simulation has some kind of value, and I'm glad to have played it. But it is not what I would call a "fun" game, and it does not come anywhere near the brilliance of “Napoleonic Wars.”
The other noteworthy entry in this strange genre was Blackwake, an 18th century shooter/slasher pirate simulator developed by a very small team. Blackwake was a phenomenal game, but its population has utterly collapsed. It’s totally unplayable today. You won't find your musket fix there.
There is one other game in this genre.
Developed by Napoleonic Wars' original team at Flying Squirrel Entertainment, Battle Cry of Freedom is a near-identical recreation of the original Warband DLC that ignited its own niche multiplayer genre, reskinned for the US Civil War.
It is the best of them all.
Shouting the Battle Cry of Freedom
Blue coats line up across from gray. Bayonets are affixed beneath barrels. Stocks are brought to shoulders. There are hundreds of men on the field, but only twenty players: they can be identified by their epaulets and sleeve insignias (for North and South, respectively). Each commands a legion of bots between ten and one hundred strong.
The command is given to fire at will. The ranks ignite, and streaks of orange lightning shoot from white powder stormclouds. The thunder of death follows. The kill feed in the upper left floods with a tsunami of names both red and blue. You take a hit to the neck; a gory death animation plays, and your regiment is now without its colonel.
That's okay, though. You had a captain as a backup. You take control of him next. And so forth, down the line, until no one but a private soldier is left; and when even he falls to musket fire, respawn and do it all again.
Battle Cry of Freedom is the first musketry-based game since the original Warband DLC to let players lead swarms of bots. Choose your regiment, from Berdan's Sharpshooters to the 54th Massachusetts (of Glory fame) and the Virginia Military Institute, and lead them to victory--as an officer, on the ground. Do this all as Civil War-era music (courtesy of the 2nd South Carolina String Band) thunders through your speakers, just as Beethoven did in the lost days of Napoleonic Wars before.
Commander Battle is the most notable feature of BCoF. But like its predecessor, it also features normal Battle, Siege, and Deathmatch modes, where players go head-to-head as individual soldiers. When the playercount supports them, these are as much fun as they ever were in “Napoleonic Wars.” An attention to detail and focus on historicity, without yielding gameplay to "realism," makes BCoF relentlessly fun. A suite of Civil War-era weapons gives variety, while intelligently designed maps force interesting engagements with minimal time-wasting (my biggest problem with both Holdfast and WoR by far).
It has some problems. Latency, mouse aiming issues, and performance troubles have never been solved. Worst by far is that BCoF never seemed capable of supporting a large enough population for any game mode other than Commander Battle.
But earlier this year, the game's 2.0 update added cavalry and significant polish to the extant systems. The game went on a deep sale, and thousands of new players started playing. For a solid two week period in March there were regularly 300 players in Siege and Battle game modes. The ensuing mass musket mayhem is the most fun I have ever had in a multiplayer game. A shootout when neither side can afford to miss makes every press of the trigger thrilling. A 100-player team deathmatch is so much more enjoyable with muskets than with assault rifles.
I told everyone I knew to buy the game. I raved about it endlessly. I was so busy playing it that I barely found the time to eat and drink. Those two weeks were glorious.
And then everyone stopped playing.
Where have all the players gone?
It happened overnight. On Sunday, two hundred players were in a single server, duking it out over control of the Alamo. The next afternoon, the count was down to forty. A week later there were hardly ten people online.
An attempt to revive the game with another sale saw a day-long resurgence, but Battle Cry of Freedom has been almost completely dead since then.
Where have the new players gone? I don't know, but gone they are.
It's true that a lot of polish is still missing. Performance in particular is still very poor. But the community seemed to be thriving. Chat was full of players, like me, astonished by how much fun they were having. We collectively dissed Holdfast and War of Rights. I thought these players would be here to stay.
They weren't.
It's always tragic when a good independent game dies. I don't know why it happens. Blackwake thrived for years. Now literally no one plays it. It's understandable for “Napoleonic Wars,” although sad, because newer titles have supplanted it. But Battle Cry of Freedom is the best game in its niche. There is nothing else on the market except War of Rights, which is a very different kind of game.
Yet War of Rights, despite its total dearth of content and meaningful updates, has 200 people online today. BCoF has eleven. This inevitably leads to new players giving the game a bad review on Steam and creates a vicious feedback loop.
I hate this so much. If I could choose any game to be stuck with forever, it would be this one. But it seems like there's no way to reverse its decline.
I don't suppose I wield much influence as far as these things go. But I wanted to write this up to say: please, buy Battle Cry of Freedom. Play it. Savor it. And to everyone at Flying Squirrel, thank you for making this game. I pray that it at least made enough to support whatever comes next. Whatever that is, I will buy it the moment it enters Early Access.