Expedition 33 was a brilliant game in a number of ways, but I loved the polearms on show in particular.

Spears have always been my favourite weapon; I am truly a spear queer at heart. I started swordfighting a couple of years ago as a way to bounce back from an injury, and also because one of my best friends would come along if I started going. I didn’t start learning to use a spear because… I couldn’t find any classes in my city. The place we ended up swordfighting at had a spear course on at the time I was recovering from my injury, and I figured, there was a good chance they’d do more of the same in future.

I proved to be correct.

I now make a two hour round trip every weekend to participate in a polearm study group. It is a literal study group, because old fencing masters were NOT clear when writing their manuals, so there’s a lot of interpretation involved. This is more than just spears; we’ll look at texts for staves, poleaxes, halberds, partisans, and whatever else we feel like. Spiedos pending because we lack the trainers, and spear and poleaxe trainers just can’t be adapted to it.

So! I love spears and all other forms of polearms, and in my 100% completely unbiased opinion, we don’t see enough of them in media. Swords are overused; nothing wrong with them, but c’mon. There’s so many other cool weapons out there. Diversify.

Because there’s so much focus on swords, when I do see polearms somewhere, I get unreasonably excited.

One of your party members, Sciel, uses a polearm, though not the traditional pointy stick most people think of. She has a cool double-sided scythe you can see in the image at the top, on the right. I didn’t use her much because her gameplay style was too overwhelming to me.

A number of enemies have polearms, too, and I was pleasantly surprised to see them used well. The attacks went beyond just stabbing with a spear; there were a few different kinds of polearms getting screen time, and they were used in a variety of interesting ways.

Expedition 33 has a counter mechanic, where you can, with perfect timing, parry and riposte an enemy’s attack. If an attack hits the whole party, then the whole party will hit back. It’s so sick.

I was perfectly fine countering most attacks, often having to see an attack multiple times before I learned the timing, which I’m told is pretty normal for someone who isn’t into the soulslike genre.

However, whenever my opponents held a polearm, I was usually able to parry the first time I saw a given attack. Their movements were exactly what I would expect; some of them are even ones I’ve performed. As such, I was able to counter properly, quickly and consistently whenever they wielded a polearm. The only exception was for jumping attacks, because I don’t use those, since, you know, I don’t want to hurt my friends and I’m not sure they can be performed safely.

It felt to me like Sandfall Interactive really did their research when developing enemy attack patterns — for polearms, at least. I can’t speak for other weapons I’m less familiar with. I’d love to see more of this.

If you know of a book, show or game with good polearm representation, let me know in the comments.