Mount & Blade: Warband

The Good
In this game you travel around a map and build your own little army, with that army you can then proceed to hunt down bad guys, go to war or pick on farmers. While a bit difficult at first, building your own army becomes a very interesting feature later on. Units can upgrade in different ways, you see. So after several hours (in-game days) of toiling I finally managed to set up a reasonable cavalry-army. Because each faction has their own upgrade-tree, it allows you to customize your group in any way you like.

In the past I have often stated that I like to be able to role-play within my games. For those unfamiliar with the term, it basically means that I want to be able to feel like I am playing my own character within an environment that responds accordingly. Many games have tried and failed at this (Skyrim been the latest to fall under that category), but Mount&Blade gets it just right. You have a huge assortment of skills at your disposal, some of which relate to combat and some of which have other functions. This means that you don't HAVE to be a soldier, you can get around just as well with becoming an engineer. Depending on your choices, your character slowly forms into what you want him or her to be, this becomes even more apparent when you see how important your choices can be (just try keeping up with enemies when you suck at path-finding), whereas in Skyrim you can pour points in smithing and still win every sword-fight that gets in your way.

What also helps you feel like you're actually role-playing is the conversation-system. When we look at Skyrim again, you'll see that you have conversation options, but all they do is allow you to get the same result in different ways. In Warband you have a reputation-meter with every single major character and depending on what you say and do to him, it will increase or decrease. Say that you are too busy to help him with a minor errand and you can expect to lose a single point, but inform somebody that you intend to support him in an election and he will be rather pleased with you. As your reputation with the character grows you can also expect to slowly see rewards coming your way, such as the ability to convince a character to direct his forces to a certain target.

A problem I see a lot in games is that they have money in it, but there is nothing to spend it on. Take for example Fable, a game where money comes at you from every direction, but it's simply impossible to lose. Zelda games also had this problem until Skyward Sword came around, in that case the problem was solved by a very good upgrade system that provided notable upgrades that became more necessary as the difficulty rose. Here however, the problem is solved by having the player purchase all his armor and forces himself. You don't get financed and most armor you pull off of dead-soldiers won't get you far, but you also need to feed your troops and pay their wages. All of this makes you that more inclined to keep undertaking missions and staging attacks.

The combat is also really enjoyable when you get the hang of it, though that might seem like something you will never do once the game starts. The idea is that you have to hold your mouse-button and steer your mouse into the direction you want to hit at. Timing is essential and unlike a lot of other games, you won't get far by standing still. If you hit an enemy with your sword while charging straight at him, it will do a ton of damage. I actually got instant-killed once because I took a lance to the face when charging at the user of said lance.

Losing some of your units can also become quite a big deal when you combine all the above. Upgrading units costs a lot of money and when you lose one of your knights or marksmen it can mean you have lost up to fourteen in-game days of training. While fighting I often found myself to be much more cooperative than I normally would, I tend to go for a frontal-charge in a lot of games, but here I mostly found myself on the flanks or rushing to the aid of a single unit.

The first time I heard about this game was in Angry Joe's review of one of the expansions and in that review he mentioned how tense the ranged-combat could get. I have to agree with him because you want to get every hit you possible can in this game. When an enemy horde is charging towards you and you miss an arrow, it means you will have to slowly reload your crossbow, focus the aim on somebody and then fire a single arrow before you have to repeat the process again. It creates a sense of realism, I can imagine crossbowmen in that time genuinely felt like this when they were on the field.

Siege battles are also really interesting to be a part of, even though they can be a bit clunky. Most siege-battles will have several hundreds of enemies fighting each other, but both sides also have a huge handicap. The attackers have to enter the castle or city first, meaning that they have to climb a small ladder or walk across a bridge (where they can be easily picked off). Once an attacking force is inside the walls though, the defenders have lost their advantage and their archers become completely useless.

Finally I'd like to say that this game is FILLED with content that you have to work towards. It took me over a hundred in-game days to receive a single village, not even a castle, but a small village with nothing in it. At that point I had been playing the game for about five days and I was nothing short of overjoyed about that relatively small achievement. The game balances the rewards out so brilliantly that it never becomes stale or too easy.

The Bad
One of the biggest annoyances in this game was pursuing enemies. You see, there is this overworld map that you need to navigate and you only dive into the action when you meet an opponent on the field. However, when my army was finally ready to take on some good challenges, most of those challenges turned the instant they saw me. The speed at which you traverse the overworld is decided by your path-finding skill, the logical solution would be to upgrade this skill if you run into this problem, but whenever I did so the enemies seemed to upgrade too.

The story is also not particularly interesting and neither are the characters. The world of Caladria is just a large landmass with a few factions dumped on them, each faction is different in the way they fight and name their titles, but there are no ideological differences or any other reason for why these countries would go to war against each other. Every single character also has the same dialogue options and the only differences are created by the reputation-meter. The only reason to interact with the characters is to get better rewards out of them, which I feel is a waste of potential.

There is also the problem with the simplistic AI when it comes to conversations. The thing is that they just couldn't take hints, one would think that after rejecting a million requests to collect taxes from villages, the people giving those requests would figure out I was not interested in leeching the citizens. This becomes doubly annoying when you keep in mind that rejecting requests is punished by a decrease in reputation.

In siege-battles I also noticed that the AI is not very aware of where you are standing. When walking up the stairs or across the bridge I was often literally pushed off by own people who seemed to think the spot I was standing on was free. Even in regular battles it felt more like the AI was aware of my horse and not me in person. They also have a problem with scenery, quite often several cavalry units would charge straight into a rock or a tree.

There is also a fair share of glitches, though I am rather inclined to let some of them slip because of how the game does things different than others. The most common problem is dodgy AI (as stated above), but I also saw my fair share of dialogue-related issues or quest-objectives not spawning correctly.

The Bottom Line
Mount&Blade: Warband is definitely not for everybody and if you can't handle a very deep RPG-system or find the combat to be simply impossible to comprehend, then this is probably not the title for you. The mix between managing your equipment, party and relationships with the massive (siege-)battles really has to sit well with you, but if it does, then you will find that this game is simply brimming with content and satisfying rewards. If you already own the first game in this series, then you will notice that this is a mere remake with additional content and some flaws ironed out, but for twenty euros (on Steam) i'd say it is worth a purchase (or the gamble, if you aren't sure if you'd like this game).