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.
An unending grind loaded with vague, misleading or entirely absent instructions on how to do things through an interface that frequently makes little to no sense. Combat is stacked against the player and is only not fatal when you successfully escape your attackers. Even normally docile creatures like deer are homicidal maniacs who will even kill you through the walls of your base or spacecraft. Expect to die literally dozens of times before you begin to get the hang of it. Bugs that prevent weapons from working at all, opponents too superhumanly fast to hit with an attack, and long periods of utter boredom while you seek out and harvest the massive quantities of materials needed just to keep your spacecraft running are the major features of the game. The biggest chunk of the experience is exploring planetary surfaces, but there is no mapping system except in space and no way to mark or record locations of useful materials or facilities. The HUD will repeatedly show you sites whose usefulness you exhausted long ago, but fail to show you trading locations or loot you weren't able to cart away in one go. Even the space map, which is only "useful" for interstellar travel, is poorly designed and expects you to pick dots (nearby stars) from a dense cluster with no visible mouse cursor. The death penalty, which you will experience frequently, is losing everything in your inventory on a planet surface, and losing that expensive starship you spent weeks grinding for if killed in space. Only the most recent save is retained, which means the autosave that was made immediately after you revived. An interactive "gravestone" icon that's supposed to restore your lost items rarely does so. Everything is simply lost, and you have to start all over again. Endless grinding isn't my idea of fun, and when "combat" always means "flee at the first sign of trouble" there is nothing to alleviate the feeling that you are never really in control of your character's fate. Depressing.
