A highly addictive medieval multiplayer game with a few major annoyances.
The melee combat in this game is great. The best thing I like about it is that the winner of a fight comes down to skill, not just whoever has the better weapon. Melee combat in War of the Roses is controlled by moving the mouse in various directions to perform different sword swings- left or right for a slash in that direction, up for a downward swing, or down for a stab. The game environment is very realistic in what your sword can be blocked by. The enemy's shield can effectively block your sword, so you must swing around it. Your sword also will not swing through cosmetic parts of the map either. If the tip of your sword hits the corner of a building in mid-swing, you aren't going to successfully hit your target. It's this level of attention to detail that makes War of the Roses fun and addictive- it makes you want to get better.
While the melee combat is great and addictive, I wish I could say the same for the ranged classes including the crossbow and longbow. I was wishing for a purely-melee game, but obviously that would get boring rather quickly, so they had to include some ranged attacks. Like the melee combat, it has a very steep learning curve. Crossbows and longbows both remind me of the bow and arrow from Team Fortress 2- it's overly frustrating to learn and master, but in the hands of someone who has mastered it, it seems grossly overpowered. Unfortunately, imbalances like this are all too common in class-based multiplayer games.
In my play time as the crossbow class I've maybe hit two targets. The slow travel speed of the projectiles, combined with the cosmetic fog that covers the map and the varying movement speeds of the players, makes it very hard to hit your mark. And if you're the Footknight on the ground being shot at by an expert crossbow sniper, there's really not much you can do but get killed, as you have no ranged attacks to fight back and often can't get out of the way in time.
It may be just me, but the horses seem overpowered to an extent as well. A good player on a horse can easily go on a rampaging killing spree with their lance. This is mainly because of how fast the horses move, and how slowly the players move, rendering them incapable of running to the side to dodge the incoming lance. Players who start to run start out at a very slow speed, and it takes considerable time to accelerate to a run. I'm pretty sure I'd gather some speed a little quicker than that if I were about to be skewered. You don't get on a horse when you spawn, instead you must find one on the map, which adds somewhat of a Halo-esque element of "Whoever gets to the good weapon first wins".
There are great things to be said about this game's customization. In addition to the unlockable custom classes, you can customize your Coat of Arms to just about anything you can imagine. And you get the satisfaction of knowing that your victims will see your design handywork on the shield that's chopping their head off in the execution cutscenes that take place during combat.
The game has only two gamemodes at present time: Conquest and Team Deathmatch. Conquest is essentially capturing objectives, and Team Deathmatch is the classic "Get X amount of kills to win". Both of these are fairly basic, but the developers have promised more to come. Graphics-wise, the blood effects on the screen are very realistic. In games like these, high framerates are crucial to staying on top of your game in fights where every split second counts, and this game typically delivers 60+ FPS on the right settings for your system. Server lag, on the other hand, has caused my death in a strange way a couple of times, but it's not bad enough to be frustrating.
Overall, War of the Roses is a game you should definitely check out if you're interested in a good, realistic melee multiplayer game. Once you get the hang of the archery classes and unlock your custom class loadouts, you'll find the game extremely addictive.