One of the few times I’m cross posting. I posted this for my medieval organization, they liked it so I figured I’d post it here.

I figured this might interest a few people around here. I recently picked up a game called Mount & Blade http://www.taleworlds.com/. Its set in a fictional realm, but otherwise the game stays pretty true to Medieval period warfare. No potions to heal, no magic. The over world plays a lot like Sid Meier’s Pirates, for those that have played that game. There are castles, towns and villages. Castles are attached to towns and need to be taken via siege (length depends on their food supplies) or siege assaults which use either Ladders/Ramps or a siege tower. Towns are major economic centers, and you can actually play the game without purposely getting into a fight and just be a traveling merchant. In different towns different goods are priced differently. Villages are the smallest, mostly just poor peasants trying to get by. In Villages you can recruit the lowest level of recruits. As you battle more and if the recruits survive the battles, they will move up a tree to become stronger fighters.

I’ll get back to explain a bit more about the over map, but the battles are fantastic too. Your character will start on horseback with a bow and arrow and a sword. With the bow you can only shoot directly forward/backward or to your right. There is a reason to be on horseback too, the game automatically includes bonuses for momentum when using melee weapons. So a full on charge with a sword swing that connects causes more damage then standing still and swinging. This works off of horseback too, as a major technique is to block, circle to the left and swing while moving. So while moving a swing will have a speed bonus too.

During battles you have a limited amount of arrows, and you can also pick up weapons/ammo from dead fighters. Also if you hit someone with an arrow it tends to stay. So sometimes you might see a shield with 10-12 arrows/bolts sticking out of it. The weapons are also realistic, a sword swings the fastest but has the least reach, as the weapon gets bigger (Moving from Sword to Great Sword/Two Handed Sword to Polearm) the speed goes down. A blunt weapon will knock someone out, who if you win the battle can be captured and sold off.

On the overmap, you’ll be attacked by smaller parties of Looters/Desserters/Mountain Bandits and Sea Raiders depending on how strong you are. Once your party is big enough and your famous enough most of them will run from you. There are 6 factions on the map, and once you become famous enough they will start offering you more and more to join them. While your independent you can loot and pillage small towns, attack their caravans and so on. The game is pretty much wide open for whatever you want to do. I can’t recommend it enough, its easily the best medieval period game I’ve played. Its few weaknesses are more then made up for in other areas. The main problem I have is that I’m already bad at First person shooters, and trying to arch from Horseback is tough. The house is controlled with WSAD keys for forward, back, left and right while the mouse chooses what you view and works for swinging the weapons. But that is just me, otherwise its a great one.

Tags: Blade, Game Review, Medieval Combat, Medieval Warfare, Mount, Mount & Blade