Reviews - br49

One of the best games I know. The combat mechanic is plain awesome, I don't know a single title that even comes close to the sword fighting or horseback simulation that Mount&Blade: Warband offers. Which is actually a shame, I would love to play a Skyrim or Gothic with Mount & Blades swordfight combat system.

I bought the game years ago, shortly after it was released, but I still come back now and then to mow down (slightly stupid) enemy AI hordes from horseback or to spend some hours on a duel server.

The singleplayer part is an open world game with no story at all. You can accept missions, you can level up yourself and your army until you can afford to conquer your own kingdom, but there is no story driving you there, you have to set your own goals.

The multiplayer is basically a team deathmatch game, with swords, bows and horses instead of the usual assault rifles. There are a lot of game modes, for example sieges (one team has to defend a castle, the other one has to take it), battle mode (like team deathmatch, but when you die you stay dead for the rest
of the round) or duels (1 vs 1 player, usually with large swords).

The netcode of this game is impressive, I have played on siege servers with 256(!) player slots.
Gameplay-wise I consider this 256 player matches to be a huge clusterfuck, I prefer the smaller setups with no more than 64 players, but there was nothing technically wrong with the 256 player games - no lags or performance issues.

There are tons of great mods for the game, both for singleplayer and multiplayer.

The graphic is ok. The characters, horses and weapons look good, however the landscape is poorly textured and poorly detailed. There are some graphic mods that can at least improve the single player part, but don't excpect wonders.