GameCyte

After playing a hefty portion of Mount & Blade, a medieval combat sandbox from TaleWorlds and Paradox Interactive, I found it very difficult to summarize the experience. The game presents an alarming amount of substance, hidden under a rough and sometimes forbidding interface. So, instead, I came up with a strained analogy for you to enjoy: Imagine, if you will, an extremely delicious candy bar, filled with a tasty nougat-and-caramel center. Now, let’s say you fumble the candy bar while unwrapping it, and it falls into a pile of gravel. The candy bar will no longer appear to be appetizing, and indeed, taking the first bite will be a downright unpleasant experience. What I must emphasize, however, is not to give up — if you can get past the outer layer of gravel, that nougat inside is still well worth the effort.

Make no mistake, Mount & Blade delivers on the many promises made during our preview: The combat system is excellent, the open-ended nature of the game provides a staggering amount of freedom, and the interactive sandbox world is rich with content and lifelike AI. That being said, let’s start off with Mount & Blade’s rough shell.

Visually, Mount & Blade is unimpressive. At best, it’s competent, but even on a high-end system, the environments and characters look utterly generic. The upside, of course, is that Mount & Blade doesn’t demand a powerful PC; the minimum requirements specify a meager 512MB of RAM and a 64MB graphics card. On the other hand, it’s difficult to get excited by a game that looks like Oblivion’s grandfather — the graphics are roughly comparable to the original Thief, a ten-year-old game which still managed to convey far more atmosphere than Mount & Blade. They’re not bad graphics; you’ll never need to squint or wonder what you’re looking at. They’re just unremarkable in any way.

Next up is Mount & Blade’s interface. One has to give TaleWorlds credit for effort here; the game includes a large amount of interactivity in its day-to-day tasks such as interacting with merchants, meeting with vital NPCs, and hunting for rumors and information. The game that Mount & Blade was compared to most frequently during our preview was Sid Meier’s Pirates!, and the comparison is apt: The bulk of Mount & Blade’s gameplay will be spent riding between castles and villages in a large, open world, and visiting the various settlements in search of information, recruits for your party, and various means of amassing wealth — be they through honest trading, menial tasks, or ruthless mercenary work. In Pirates!, the various in-town tasks were handled through a simple menu interface, but Mount & Blade goes a step further, allowing you to explore the towns and castles on foot, walking about and interacting with the various merchants and NPCs in an RPG-style format. Unfortunately, as admirable this design is towards trying to add atmosphere to the game, ultimately it begins to backfire in terms of simple playability.

As noted earlier, with the graphics looking as generic as they do, the towns and castles begin to blend together after a while. Eventually, you will want to skip the chore of having to walk halfway through the town just to chat with your intended target, and cut right to the task at hand. Mount & Blade, thankfully, does offer a means of skipping most of this — calling up a menu with the Tab key will allow you to jump directly to the spot you need, but this isn’t always enough. Case in point: Whenever you visit the local tournament arena (where you can brawl for fun, profit, and XP), you are dropped in front of the arena master, and must walk up and initiate a conversation before proceeding further. It’s cute the first time, being able to stand atop the arena and look down at the battlegrounds below, but after a few visits, it just seems like a needless intermediate step, having the game load up the arena master’s platform before then having to load the conversation interface four seconds later. Ultimately, players will find themselves wanting to skip as much non-combat on-foot time as possible, which isn’t always allowed.

The rest of the game’s interface is perfectly adequate, providing a simple-but-practical layout of Mount & Blade’s vital statistics. This is where the game’s surprisingly deep substance begins to shine through: A quick glance at any of the game’s menus reveals just how much is going on in Calradia, the realm your character inhabits. Viewing the character screen will lay out a broad statistical layout — one’s character is made up of four basic attributes which, in turn, power dozens of skills and feats, all of which can be powered up through level-granted points and in-game practice. From weapon skills (one-handed, polearms, archery) to social skills (persuasion, party management, commerce) to tactical skills (prisoner management, spotting distance, siege tool-building), and a multi-step character creation process, it’s possible to engineer a character in any direction. Furthermore, Mount & Blade provides an encyclopedic listing of the game’s hundreds of locations and vital NPCs, each one containing every single piece of information you may need, and best of all, it’s all cross-referenced. Every quest in your log will highlight the related NPCs and locations, allowing you to quickly and easily move ahead with your plans.

For example, suppose your job is to collect a debt owed by one lord to another. Clicking the debtor’s name in your quest log will immediately call up that character’s entry, listing his allegiances, your reputation with him (which will affect your potential avenues of collection), and the last report you received as to his location. Clicking on said location will subsequently show that entry, including its owner and kingdom, your reputation there, its current prosperity, and best of all, its precise location on the map — handily displayed relative to your current position. The sheer amount of information and its accessibility is enough to make a stat-hungry RPG fan weep, and better still, is put to extended use within the game. Each NPC and location takes on a life of its own as Calradia’s factions wage a constant battle for supremacy of their own accord. Simply making camp for a few hours will demonstrate the struggles of Calradia, supplying the player with an ongoing news ticker of the kingdom’s comings and goings — armies besieging castles, lords taken prisoner, towns claimed by raiders. And, of course, the player is free to wander the countryside independent of these constant events, or seek out and involve himself in any such clash he happens across. Mount & Blade is as truly open-ended and replayable a game as I’ve seen in a long time.

The vital question, then, is whether the game is enjoyable enough to warrant playing at all, let alone several replays. The answer is thankfully “yes,” but be warned — Mount & Blade takes a lot of getting used to. The combat engine, as promised, is well-executed, and mounted combat is
a unique experience. That being said, it’s also very difficult. Players who approach the game like a typical 3D hack-n-slash are going to be taught a series of painful lessons, as they discover Mount & Blade’s emphasis on realism, followed by its extremely sharp difficulty curve. The combat system is by no means difficult to grasp; subtle moves of the mouse provide directional attacks from the various weapons, and careful timing will allow players to execute the directional parries easily, allowing players to take on single opponents without much trouble. However, the enemies’ AI is no slouch, and while amateur opponents will line up single-file for their beatings, before long, players can expect to see their foes surrounding and flanking them, attacking all at once and overwhelming their character. The odds also increase against the player at a rapid clip: A single character can singlehandedly manage a small band of looters, four or five men strong, if he is skilled. However, after only amassing a small amount of reputation, those small bands will soon be replaced by expert bandits and seasoned warriors, one or two dozen at a time. These baddies will effectively cut their way through even a party of comparable size, forcing the player to quickly recruit expensive experts of his own if he wishes to survive.

Then, there is the mounted combat, the eponymous feature of Mount & Blade. This serves as the perfect example of Mount & Blade’s rough exterior yet satisfying substance: The mounted combat, at first, is nearly impossible to perform. The emphasis on realism can make for a thoroughly frustrating initial experience, finding that the horses do not turn well at speed, your mount presents a wide-open target for archers, and hitting someone with a sword on the fly requires absolute pinpoint timing. Even the training dummies during the game’s tutorial will mock you, standing there gleefully as you ride past again and again, your blade slicing open air after your fifth, tenth, and twentieth pass. It’s a humbling experience at best, and it can easily frustrate an impatient player who’s eager to start wreaking havoc. However, with practice, the timing will eventually come, and the first time you nail a hapless foe with a one-shot chop to the face at a full gallop, it’s immensely satisfying. Soon, you’ll be riding through entire crowds of enemies, taking out man after man from atop your unstoppable steed, your long hours of grueling practice having given way to an empowering and enjoyable gameplay experience. Of course, then you go up against enemies who are also riding horses, and then you’re hosed, but once you master that, you can handle anything.

For those players who are prepared to dedicate themselves to learning Mount & Blade, a masterfully deep and enjoyable game awaits you. Mount & Blade takes the examples set by previous entries in the sandbox genre and expands upon them, providing an enormous world with thousands of possibilities — it’s possible to play for dozens of hours without even exhausting the content from your starting kingdom, and there’s still four more to explore. Players searching for a visual feast should look elsewhere, and casual players definitely need not apply. For hardcore players, though, Calradia is ready to chew you up and spit you out — like a mouthful of some of the sweetest gravel you ever tasted.

Mount & Blade launches on September 16th for the PC.

Full disclosure: At time of publication, Paradox Interactive was a client of TriplePoint PR, a firm managed by Richard Kain — owner of our parent company Pantheon Labs. A TriplePoint representative sent us the above game.

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