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Reviews » Mount and Blade [PC]

It's got swords, lances, horses, axes, food, quests, and bandits, but it's got no magic. No potions either. In fact, for the most part if they didn't have it in 800 AD you won't get it in this game either. And while it's got hit points and armor classes, it's not really a role playing game in the traditional sense, nor is it a strategy game, although strategy is certainly involved.

It's TaleWorlds' Mount and Blade, and what it is, is surprisingly engrossing, entertaining, and good looking. Even though it's only somewhere near half finished, it's thoroughly playable. Somewhere in between Dungeons and Dragons and Mechwarrior lies what could almost be termed a medieval life simulator, if medieval life were more like King Arthur's world and less about lice, mud, and the plague.

The game places you as a newly resolved Adventurer, having recently quit a life of your choosing - squire, hunter, priest, or merchant for male characters, and comparable past lives for females. This is an important choice, because it affects what starting equipment and stats you get. For example, starting as a squire gets you a nice big sword and some armor but not a lot else. Hunter gets you a bow and arrows and a fat bows skill. Merchant starts you with a dagger, a club, and maybe a bow, but you also get two horses and a stash of salable merchandise.

Once you choose your profession and distribute your points through a quite nice looking and functional button interface, you are then taken to a screen where you can customize your character's face via a fairly large array of sliders on the right side of the screen. There are also options to select a hairstyle, and a hair and skin texture/color.

Finally you are dropped into the game world in the town square of a place called "Zendar". Zendar is, as far as I can tell, the only "finished" town in the game - that is, the only one you can walk around freely and talk to people. In the others, there is no town square, there is a text menu with choices to talk to the merchant, the smiths, go to the tavern, or speak with the town's Lord.

In the taverns, you can speak with the owner, and he will recommend people to you to hire into your own personal army. Building your forces is important - getting caught alone by a group isn't necessarily an instant loss, but more often than not you'll be surrounded and beaten down before you can swing more than a couple times.

The "overworld" of the game consists of a generic temperate landscape scattered with towns and mountains, and the occasional river or forest. Navigating it is the simple "click to go here" of most realtime strategy games. You are not alone out here however, there are travelling bands of bandits, river pirates, and war parties from the Vengir and Swadian factions, as well as groups of farmers and peasants, etc. among other surprises.

If your group (shown as a single man - on a horse if you happen to be riding one) meets up with another group, a screen with several options will appear based on who the other group is. In the case of river pirates for example, you can choose to fight or surrender. You'll of course be fighting - and then the real fun begins.

You'll find yourself somewhere within a randomly generated, and quite striking-looking if not totally realistic landscape. Somewhere within this surprisingly large area are your opponents. You control your character using the WASD keys, and your view with the mouse. You have a choice of first or third person views, third person is default. It is also generally preferable, although first person view would work incredibly with a set of VR goggles. The fighting system is simple but effective - left button down swings your weapon back, releasing it swings it forward. The type of swing you use is based on what weapon you are holding, and the orientation of your view. Yellow arrows appear on the screen to let you know which direction your weapon will be moving to when you click. Right-clicking defends in much the same manner. If you have a shield, you'll defend with that instead of parrying with your weapon. Bows are handled separately - pressing and holding the left mouse button nocks and draws an arrow, and releasing fires it. Your aiming reticle changes size based on how accurate the shot will be - holding a bow drawn causes your arms to tire and so your aim gets worse. Crossbows are immune to this problem, and do more damage when they hit, but cannot be reloaded while on horseback. Movement affects your accuracy with both, and shooting from horseback has its own skill.

Speaking of the horses, they are pretty incredible. Their animations are lifelike and smooth, and altogether convincing. Furthermore, they're emminently useful. If you can afford a lance and a fast horse, you become a very dangerous opponent indeed. You can "couch" your lance, which is essentially holding it horizontally while riding as fast as you can. This does, I'm sure you can imagine, a Metric Ton of damage. Most weak enemies will drop in one shot. In my final battle before I reached level 6, I led my force into combat against 12 Dark Knights. My entire army was slaughtered, but with a little patience and luck, I managed to take out all of the enemies with lance passes.

For how nice the game looks, it uses surprisingly little computing horsepower (hah, horsepower, geddit) - I'm running it on an athlon 900 and a GeForce 2 and it doesn't get unplayably slow until there are dozens of units around in a combat sequence. Higher framerates would be preferred, but it's certainly playable under normal circumstances. I only encountered one major technical problem, which was that rocks and some other ground surfaces showed up in a nuclear glowing blue color that looked vaguely like water. This was fixable by opening up the game preference file (via a button on the game's launcher) and turning off bump mapping.

In terms of gameplay, something that bothers me is how exaggerated the terrains are in the combat theaters. They're a lot of fun, and point out in bright lights the tactical possibilities, but they look like they belong in some kind of candy-land. Further aggrivation comes in the form of mouse controls that don't always respond quite the way you would ordinarily expect - sometimes at random your view will jump around for no particular reason. I'm guessing it's framerate-based, so it's entirely possible I'm the only one that's ever seen it.

The downloadable demo is fully functional other than it only allows you to go to level 6. This took me a couple days from start of play. To buy the full version however is only US$12, which is valid for all future versions through the final release. I like the game a lot personally, and given that it's only two people doing all the developing, it's a pretty astonishing achievement.

Mount and Blade - PC

Presentation

Very nicely polished looks, sounds are functional and more than adequate. Default music is appropriate, and replacable. Some things aren't done, but you can see where it's meant to be going.

Gameplay

Much like many things in life, the game tends to have stretches of mild boredom punctuated with intense excitement. Granted here these punctuations tend to last half an hour or more.

Replayability

There's not really an "end" to the game as reviewed, but for that reason you keep coming back to it. Enemy forces get larger and stronger to match your skills and forces. I'm still playing it daily and it's been weeks.

Value

~$12 for a very professionally developed game and upgrades through final? Yes please!

Overall

Action fans will like it. Strategy fans will like it. Roleplaying fans might be more on the fence but there's enough numbers involved that they will probably like it anyway. Also the game is only a bit more than half finished. Go get it I say, and at least try it.