Mount & Blade

I came to this franchise late and received this Mount and Blade as a gift and it is awesome. The sandbox game play makes for hours and hours of fun,.. Then I found Mount and Blade Warband and its mods. They blow this one out of the water. Think of Mount and Blade Warband more of Mount and Blade 1.5. While this is a great game, don't bother buying it since Warband is out there now.

Most of the reveiws here seem to be blindly focusing on the freedom of true sandbox and ignoring the downsides of this title. There is no endgame, and play literally goes on forever. As the player character grows in power, expect the AI to single you out for harrassment. Eventually, enemy kings with all their nobles and massive armies will target your fiefs exclusively and you will spend all of your time racing between fiefs trying to defend them without the support of YOUR king and HIS nobles and armies, and that's when the dominoes begin to fall. The unique action combat system has a steep learning curve, not helped by glitches that frequently cause attacks to pass right through an enemy's body without doing damage and the requirement of pinpoint accuracy for an attack to do any damage. That's why the game is set by default for the player and his warriors to take only 25% incoming damage whilst applying 100% to opponents (when the game acknowledges a hit at all). If, despite these handicaps, you develop any skill at all, expect the AI to start cheating to compensate. Worst among these is the faction labeled "Khergits", who are programmed to blatantly defy the laws of physics at every opportunity (the game was designed and programmed by Turks, and the Khergits are meant to represent the historical Turks and Mongols, go figure), with never-miss mounted bowshots over infinite distances through stone walls and mountains against unseen targets with machine gun rates of fire and apparently unlimited ammo whilst in full gallop. They can also charge up vertical precipices and leap their horses off mountain tops without taking falling damage. They also move with superhuman speed. You and your troops, however, are bound by limited ammo, heavy accuracy penalties whilst moving, and you can kill your horse with a misstep on an uneven surface. There are a lot of good ideas in this game, like the skills-based RPG system for developing the player character and his companions, time limits for quests (you can't ignore them for very long or you may anger important NPCs) and the attention to realistic weapon and armor detail is awesome. But village and castle management feels like an afterthought, every NPC has dead-end conversation options that shouldn't have made it to release, the cheating AI is simply overpowered after about 10 hours of play, and you'll eventually give up in frustration as enemy factions steamroll over your properties while your faction ignores your plight. I'm told the Warband sequel/reimagining alleviates some of these problems, and that version also seems to be more popular than the original iteration. But I've also been told that if you already own the original M&B that Warband isn't worth gettting because it's only minor changes. Your mileage may vary, and it might be more like buying Civ II when you already own the original Civ: each Civ sequel improves on the weak points of its predecessor, and the same may be true in M&B. Somehow I doubt it.

The game starts of relatively strong. You're set in the world and get the basics from the tutorial, then figure out the rest as you go. It's easy to get lost for a good few hours just roaming around, trying to figure things out. It's quite fun. The combat system is fairly simple, but complex enough considering it's supposed to be about armies fighting. However, a lot of the game mechanics end up leading to just "grind some more". The quests are all terrible, mostly fetch quests, delivering letters (so opposite of fetch?) or herding cows in a poor minigame. Your army's size is hard capped to ~50 in early to mid game, and the only way to increase it is by grinding "renown", which is done through said quests as well as fights. Fights get tedious as the unfair odds always mean you are required to go in front of your army, wading through dozens of enemies on your own to soften them up for your force. In a lot of cases, you're actually better off not even bringing an army if you want to grind that renown, which is just... weird and tedious. Fighting with the same few moves over and over, through hundreds of enemies that all behave the same gets boring, and it seems to be the only way to progress past the mid-game. You can have all the money you might need, you can be skilled at fighting and have a skilled (if small) army, but the only way to progress appears to be sinking 10-20+ hours into just being allowed to increase your army size. That's kind of a dealbreaker for me, since you end up playing "towards" a goal of sorts, and then have this hidden obstacle revealed to you. All in all, fun to pick up and spend some time with, but an egregious time sink of repetitive actions to get anywhere past the mid-game content.

I bought this game on CD about a year after release, and the only reasons I'm not still playing it are: 1 - Warband has several additional features that make it preferable, even though I like the original map better. It's also less prone to crashing, especially while running large mods. 2 - Windows 10 doesn't support the DRM used on the CD, and my attempt to download this game elsewhere resulted in a failure to run. I have not downloaded the GOG version (yet), and am not sure whether I'll have the same issues or not. 3 - Several fantastic total overhaul mods (The Last Days of Middle Earth, Star Wars:Conquest, etc.) have been ported to Warband, and are much more stable on the newer game. The main reason for playing the original is that several other significant mods for the original game were NOT ported to Warband, and will not run on it. A few of those require a LAA memory utility (there are several free ones) to prevent crashes, as original M and B cannot access more than 2Gb of RAM, no matter how much your PC has available. In short, if you're debating between this and Warband, buy the newer game. If you're looking to run some of the older mods, you'll need this one. For those unfamiliar, starting out is tough, as it's a steep learning curve for both your character and yourself until you've got a strong party of high-level troops. There is not "story", other than the one you create, but there are "tasks" you can accept from other lords. With more familiarity, the beginning is actually pretty easy. Kingdom management was added in Warband, so you can only be an independent mercenary or a pledged vassal to a king, not a ruler yourself in this game.

I was more impressed by the actual concepts behind the game than the actual game itself. Nothing like that initial charge riding on a horse into battle while commanding archers, foot soldiers and cavalry on the fly. Sadly stiff animations with limited moves made the actual combat dull and uninspiring. The rest of the overall game is such cookie cutter rinse and repeat formula. So just think of the base game as a modders resource, because all the fun is in the community mods. Even for all it's flaws and limitation this is still a unique experience.