Everyone stop whatever you’re doing and prepare yourselves because next week, demo servers are opening up for Anvil Empires, the latest MMO from the developers at Siege Camp. Have you ever played a battle in Total War and thought, “It’d be pretty cool if each one of those units were a player”? Because in Anvil Empires, that’s kind of what you’re getting. So if you’re someone like me who really likes the concept (and perhaps even a lot of the gameplay) of Siege Camp’s other MMO, Foxhole, but honestly prefers to get your massive territorial wars sorted out the old-fashioned way, then Anvil Empires is where it’s at.

Anvil Empires got my attention from the first moment I heard about it. The premise is that you are a member of one of three factions, and you’re tasked with building up a nice little settlement for yourself and then ultimately joining your faction for war against the Others. You’re once again a cog in the machine, but this time with a bit more sandbox gameplay. Plus, there are no more guns, just swords and boards, bows and arrows, and all manner of old-school siege equipment.

Lucky for us, but mostly me, I was invited to a preview of the game’s closed beta just last week to experience the crowning achievement of Anvil Empires gameplay loop: a castle siege!

Don’t call it a reskin

Anvil Empires is obviously built from the foundation laid by Foxhole, but it’s so much more too. The developers didn’t want to simply make Foxhole but with swords. They clearly wanted to build a game that uses a lot of the same great features, such as the massive scaled battles and cooperative teamwork required to make any progress in Foxhole, but then increase the scale and the core gameplay for an individual player.

For example, while Foxhole has massive battles in a persistent world, the battles themselves within a certain area can only really support about 200 to 300 players, or so I am told. Anvil Empires’ engine, however, was built entirely from scratch to handle up to 1,000 players in a single dense battle. That’s actually a really huge achievement; it’s taken some studios years to achieve that sort of server capacity. In fact, part of this Steam Next Fest demo is meant to stress test just this feature.

In addition, Anvil Empires gives players a lot more autonomy than Foxhole. As I mentioned in my previous coverage of Foxhole, you really are a cog in the war machine. You find a task that needs completing for your side and then start completing it to aid the overall war. It might be going to get raw materials for the factories, then crafting those materials into some weapons or other gear, and then taking that gear to the front lines.

But in Anvil Empires, players have a lot more activities that are traditionally expected from MMOs and sandboxes games. For one example, you’ll build a house and do some farming. The developers expect a trade economy to be built around small homesteads and settlements of players. And they even mentioned something about going into the underworld for mining resources! Not to mention your character even has a hunger meter like you’d see from any traditional survival game or old-school sandbox MMO.

As I noted, the focus of Anvil Empires’ demo for Steam Fest Next is specifically on combat, the siege mechanics, and stress testing those servers. With the demo, I really can feel the epic scale of the fights. I recently sat down and rewatched Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, and there are certainly a lot of similarities, like the battle for Helm’s Deep vibes coming from Anvil Empires’ sieges. At the same time, some of the small-scale combat did feel a bit clunky – but more on that later.

The battle for Helm’s… for some other faction’s keep!

Fighting over a keep the scale of which we get to experience in the demo is kind of the penultimate climax of a battle in Anvil Empires. Since this is a persistent world with MMO mechanics, a battle on this scale is something players will build up to over time. Fortunately for us, the focus of the demo is specifically on these battles, so we get to experience them right away.

In this battle, we joined the side that was sieging the keep. We spawned at a nearby camp and ran over to the big tent to start outfitting ourselves. This was all very Foxholian. I could see that there were multiple soldiers at the camp, which represent the ability for players to respawn that that location. In Foxhole, players could make shirts and deliver those at the frontlines as their spawns. Siege Camp tells us that these soldiers are similar, except that the plan is for players to make the soldiers, train them up, and deliver them to the camp. So the same, but also slightly different. Perhaps it’s another way for players to participate in the war effort without directly being involved in combat.

At the tent, I could equip light or heavy armor, which sort of dictated which weapons I could equip as well. For instance, if you grab a long bow, I don’t think you’re able to then take the shield since it’s a two handed weapon, or something like that. It was a bit clunky since I didn’t know all the terminology; all I knew was there were warnings that I couldn’t use my sword because of other gear.

From there, I was able to do a lot of the cooperative game mechanics you’d expect from Foxhole. You can load up a cart with boulders, pull the cart over towards a trebuchet, and then take and load it with the ammo. Finally, hop on the treb and let the boulders fly. Also, players needed to work together to get on the battering ram and push it over to the gates to start smashing it down.

Not to be outdone by the siege weapons, other players began to line up series of ladders and even some siege towers to get us up and on the walls at the same time.

There’s another unique element to the castle sieges: Most of the structures, with some exceptions like the grand structure somewhere in there, are destructible. So even while I’m standing on the wall and players are smashing away at it, you’ll find the ground fall beneath your feet! Not the most pleasant way to go out, but it was entertaining.

Now, once we were in the castle, that’s when I got to experience the real deal combat. That’s you, and me, and several hundred of our closest friends bashing away at each other. This is where the mechanics began to feel a bit… stiff. Anvil Empires is very much going for a real combat vibe. So of course there are no fireballs raining down (other than the trebuchet boulders), and there are no paladins carving a path through the enemies.

Instead, it was more like my group of friends here hold the right click (block button) and then randomly tap the left click while mousing in the direction of attack. Don’t step too far in front of your friends, else you’ll be killed real quick. Instead we all just kind of dancing back and forth in this way. It’s sort of realistic, I bet, but not exactly the most exciting stuff.

So maybe the massive army fight is a bit boring from that point of view. Perhaps it improves on a smaller scale. Well… your attacks swing kind of slowly too, so if you do happen to be in a one-on-one or two-on-one battle and you miss, what happens next is not going to be great. It’s just kind of slow and not very satisfying.

There are more combat actions than just “hold block and swing sword.” When you have a shield, you can raise it above your head and the head in front of you so that you can shield you and a buddy from arrows falling on you while that person does the attacks. I mean, that is pretty cool. And the way arrows worked was a bit awkward to shoot, but line of sight and positioning really matters, so that’s cool too.

Cool concepts aside, how I felt playing the combat itself was a bit mixed. And I don’t really know if there’s a way to fix that. Obviously the Anvil Empires isn’t trying to be a traditional action combat MMO where you get to jump in and perform whirlwind attacks to knock your enemies back. But the alternative of slowly walking (though there will be horses too) into the fray and just holding a block in the line while clicking and hoping you’ve got more lives than the enemies or whatever happens to eventually move one side forward just didn’t tickle that exciting part in my brain.

The aspect of the siege itself, though? Incredible. The build up to beginning and getting the siege started was all really exciting. Moving the weapons of war and firing the trebuchets, and even getting the boulders over to the trebs, is all very cool. And if you are one of the main guilds leading the battle and barking out orders and telling your allies where to attack or who needs reinforcing… I bet that is all super exciting and very engaging.

But when it comes down to the individual and your experience fighting other players, I think the jury is still out. But you don’t have to just take my word on it; the demo will be open for everyone next week, the register button should be up now, and the battles are about to get underway. So grab a sword, grab a spear, and get in there!

Every other week, Massively OP’s Sam Kash delivers Fight or Kite, our trip through the state of PvP across the MMORPG industry. Whether he’s sitting in a queue or rolling with the zerg, Sam’s all about the adrenaline rush of a good battle. Because when you boil it down, the whole reason we PvP (other than to pwn noobs) is to have fun fighting a new and unpredictable enemy!