Game Review - Mount and Blade: Warband

Foes to conquer, battles to fight, and power to take: this world has much of these, and more, to offer those who can handle them.

Hey there, everybody--tiding over this week's consumer review with a game that's been sucking up my free time particularly severely this past little while--Mount and Blade: Warband.

Mount and Blade: Warband is a role-playing game that puts focus on action and strategy; players must fight their way from poverty to power in a merciless medieval world called Calradia. Multiple warring kingdoms pull and tug at one another, hoping to put down their rivals and eventually dominate the continent. Deciding which--or none--of these powers emerges at the top is up to the player.

The world is entirely open from the very beginning of the game; if you really want, you can start riding horseback all the way to the opposite corner of the world the second you first pull up the map. It's always wise, though, to see about performing local tasks, gathering some fresh recruits for your war party, or finding the lords of your neck of the woods to do favors for. There is no set path in any direction that the player need follow, and so each run of the game has the opportunity to be something different, depending only on your own ambitions.

Combat is a large part of the game--as the name suggests, you spend your time marching from location to location on the map leading a personal warband, full of distinctly regional troops with different skills and equipment; this is just one of the factors of replayability, with how the player character arms themselves and builds their personal skillset being another chief one. The game highlights large, pitched battles showing hundreds of characters shouting and slashing away at each other--battles which the player has great potential to change through real-time battlefield commands and taking up arms to fight themselves. The sheer number of paths that the player can choose from is a core aspect of the game, and so it naturally extends to the fighting as well.

This universal open-endedness is not necessarily an immediate advantage, though. Aside from the fact that the player begins the game very weak with little weaponry and no allies, which makes navigating the bandit-ridden world a hazard, this looseness of gameplay can leave players with no prior expectations of the game feeling downright aimless. This is a shame, as when that first veil of blank puzzlement looking for stuff to do is pierced, you're rewarded with a rich environment of struggling political factions and opportunities for exciting plunder and combat.

A related point to that dizzying open-endedness is the breadth of the map itself in conjunction with how the gameplay is designed; there is a lot of back-and-forth travel between cities, which means plenty of time spent staring at your party marker speed across the map screen as you wait to arrive at your destination. A slight but considerable chore.

That the game is dated also is its own elephant in the room; the graphics were a bit dated even when the game first released in 2010 (11 years ago now... is that really right? *shudders*). Beyond just the appearance of the game, the UIs throughout the game are somewhat unintuitive and force you to wrap your head around them, and even navigating the world can feel clumsy and a bit less than responsive at times. These are issues, definitely; but, they are not insurmountable, and once you get used to the antiquated everything about the game, you can't help but feel a bit charmed by it all. Any time spent playing lets you know that taking it in stride in order to enjoy the game is very, very worth it.

What's left is a fantastically open-ended and ruggedly charming piece of classic role-playing gaming that means both nostalgia and contemporary fun alike for so many people. Even with a sequel that was produced just within the last couple of years (after many, many years of much hype and anticipation), I'm pressed to think that Warband will continue to stay long after many of its inferiors have since faded out.

Welp, that makes another old game review that maybe some other pasty kid out there can relate to. See you next time!