Mount and Blade: Warband

Mount and Blade: Warband is, in its most basic form, the Total War series For Men. Forget the pomp and circumstance of commanding hundreds of men from a floaty platform in the sky. Forget watching your men die and thinking “Oh well, there’s more where that came from”. In this game, you’re down there fighting, hacking your way through the enemy, leading the charges, fighting off sieges. In this game, it’s your ass on the line. For all that you’re a commander, you’re also a soldier, and you’re expected to fight alongside your men.

The issue is: Your men? Untrained peasants. You’re barely better yourself. So you’ll trot off to the woods to find some bandits (because that’s where bandits live), and you’ll go to lay the smackdown on their merry asses. And your men will be killed. And you will be knocked unconscious, and dragged around for days. And when the game thinks you have learnt a lesson in humility, it will set you free with, if you’re lucky, the clothes you were wearing.

It’s easy to quit here. In fact, it’s easy to quit anywhere. This never stops being a hard game. But for those who persevere, you’ll get more men. And you’ll train them. And you’ll find those bandits, and you’ll kill them. And those you don’t kill, you’ll sell into slavery. And you will rejoice. It’s that kind of game. You’ll build an empire. You’ll fight kingdoms. You’ll lose to kingdoms. You’ll triumph and fail in the face of adversity. And you’ll love it.

Visually, the game is… disappointing. To say the least. It would be graphically disappointing in 2005. The men look like men, the women look like men. The horses look like horses, which do look a little bit like men. The textures are low-res, even on the highest graphics, and my crappy laptop could easily run the game on full everything without any graphical lag. Depending on how important graphics are to you that’s either fantastic or godawful. After a while you’ll learn to deal with it, but it can be a little confronting when you first fire it up.

Combat is, for the most part, a thing of beauty. I’ve never seen a game handle battles so well. Fights unfold and roll across the landscape, short brutal curb-stomps, long, extended brawls, and the messy, chaotic, confusing clusterfuck that is two armies engaging. You’ll rejoice over every enemy killed, regret every ally lost, and fight for every inch in a siege. It’s incredible. The connection that this game inspires in you to your avatar is something unmatched in any game I’ve played before.

However, it’s a little weird to think about. My big dude would wander out of battle having killed literally half of the enemies on the field, covered in blood, relatively unscathed. Once you get to the point of having high-level armour, you’ll not even notice the arrow through your chest. Or head. Your horse will be killed under you, and you’ll get up and brutally murder the twenty men who shot it. The point I’m trying to make here is that by the end of the game, you are essentially playing as a goddamn abomination. After a year of in game time, my character had killed over two thousand people. Two thousand. With an axe. Probably grinning like a goddamn madman too.

There’s another side, too. Once you start to gain control over a few villages, maybe a castle or two, you get the ability to upgrade and maintain your own kingdom, or become part of a larger one. You can trade barbs with other lords in kingdom politics, preside over your own lords as king of your own territories, or ask for a lady’s hand in marriage to get in good with her dad. It’s obvious that thought has gone into the less bloodthirsty parts of this game.

Not enough, though. At times it can be frustratingly shallow. Want to adjust taxes in your kingdom? Nope. How many people live in your city? No idea. What kind of trade is influencing my weekly rent I receive? Too bad, there’s no such information. It’s the same with the romance. Want to have a kid, start a dynasty? Not gonna happen. Want to find out about the woman you’re going to marry? You get to know what poems she likes and who her parents are. I’m not joking.

I’d like to take a moment to just have a quick rant about the romance system. You get invited to feasts in your kingdom once you get to a certain social status, where you get to meet ladies and tell them they’re great. They think you’re pretty great too! Then you meet them a few times, tell them a poem which they may or may not like, there’s no way to know. And then if her dad likes you, marriage happens. If he doesn’t, you elope or find someone else. Romance!

It’s a hard game to recommend. Not because it’s bad, but because it’s the kind of game that people will either love with a passion or despise. It’s not a game you can play for a few minutes, either. It’s the kind of game that sucks you in, slow-feeds you a constant stream of goals, and then watches as you relish in your victories. And they will be your victories. The game is a testament to the very idea of non-linearity. I dropped 40 hours into it over four days when I first got it.

If you’re the sort of person that’s always wanted that extra bit of control over the fights in your RTS’s, if you’re the sort of person who’s played kingdom management games and wanted to have a more… direct say in policy administration, this is for you. If you’re a goddamn maniac who wants to cut down swathes of villagers with an axe, this is also for you. Just don’t go in expecting the world, and you should be happy with what you get.