Chivalry 2

Medieval settings are a weakness of mine, so I wanted this to rank higher. Chivalry 2 drops you into large objective battles where friends charge a castle gate together and half of them die laughing. Swings are directional, so the first few matches are humbling. It missed the top 10 because the player pool is smaller than the big shooters and the learning curve punishes drop-in friends. Still a fine counterweight to modern military shooters. Bring friends who laugh when they lose.

Chivalry 2 is the game that sounds ridiculous in description and then immediately makes sense the moment a 64-player siege starts and someone charges at you screaming. The Team Objective mode gives the chaos a direction, so even players new to the game understand roughly what the round is trying to accomplish. Skill matters, but a lower-level player can still contribute by staying in the formation and not running off alone. What keeps it at eight rather than higher is that it is purely competitive PvP with no co-op option, which limits how broadly I can recommend it. For players who specifically want big-scale medieval brawling, though, nothing in the catalog comes close.