Game Reviews

I had access to the Mount & Blade: Warband beta. And I have to admit, I was less than impressed.

Graphically, Mount & Blade: Warband is a nightmare even with the visual improvements the developers reportedly implemented over the original Mount & Blade. Comparatively, it’s graphical equivalent is the original Half-Life or something else from the late 90′s / early 00′s during the “butt-ugly” pubescent phase of 3D gaming. The menus are basic to say the least. There is no voice acting. There is only text and blocky graphics.

I kept asking myself, “What the hell is the mass appeal of this game? Why are there so many rabid cultists following this title? I’m a gamer of almost 30 years. How am I not part of this ‘in’ crowd?” I found myself only able to sit with the game for 20 – 25 minutes at a time. After a while, I just stopped thinking about the game. Afterall, I had a kill ratio to keep up in Battlefield Bad Company 2 and I still had about 1,000,000 more colonels to assassinate in Just Cause 2.

Then I got my hands on the full version of the Mount & Blade: Warband. I decided to give it an honest-to-god second try. I’m glad I did.

And now… I get it. I feel like I’m part of the “in” crowd now.

Mount and Blade: Warband is a great game. It’s fantastic. It’s addictive. I want to take a day off of work to do nothing but play it. For the past few nights, I forcefully had to to stop myself from playing and go to bed sometime before 3:00 AM. (Don’t tell my wife. She’d kill me if she knew what time I was coming to bed. I’ve been using the excuse “Oh, I’m just coming back from the bathroom” when she catches me.) I foresee many more near-sleepless nights to come because of this game, too. But that doesn’t mean that every PC gamer that’s vaguely interested in this title should drop what they’re doing and run out and buy it.

At first appearance, many gamers might confuse Mount & Blade: Warband with a poor man’s Oblivion or Morrowind. Some gamers have asked me if it was like the Total War series. To those iquiries, I can only reply, “yea, it’s kinda like that… but not really.” While the leveling experience is similar to Oblivion–the more you use a skill, the faster it increases–and tactically, it can be very similar to Total War games, the closest game I can think of to describe Mount and Blade: Warband is Sid Meier’s Pirates!.

You start the game as a single soldier looking to prove himself in the world. It’s just you, your sword, your crossbow, and your horse. The rest of your digital life is in your hands.