Mount & Blade: Warband | Xbox One

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Mount & Blade: Warband sets off on the wrong foot. A direct port of the 2010 PC release, it boasts appalling visuals and an initial lack of direction that will likely have you ready to throw in the towel before you’ve even gotten started. Fighting past that urge, however, allows the game’s deep and tactical systems to blossom into something quite compelling.

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by Sam
​Sant

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@SlamShotSam

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Developer: TaleWorlds
Entertainment
Publisher: Ravenscourt
Platforms: Xbox
One, PS4, PC, Mac
Players: 1 - 32

More a medieval simulator than a fantasy adventure, Warband begins by asking the player to define their character. In keeping with the societal values of the period it depicts, if you elect to play a female or lowborn character you’ll need to fight that little bit harder to be accepted into certain circles. Penetrating these influential groups helps to achieve the ultimate aim of the game in taking the throne as monarch of all Calradia.

It’s a long, long road to get there, full of manipulative politics and scheming warfare. Problem is, the road has no signage. Mount & Blade removes the training wheels far earlier than you’re prepared for, resulting in an uncertain and meandering start to the journey that forced us online to seek some direction. It’s when we were able to gain focus, and concoct a long-term game plan as a result, that everything clicked into place, making the intentional obscuring of information questionable. There’s not holding the player’s hand, and there’s throwing them to the wolves.

Pencilled in first on the agenda was winning battles to build renown and coax nobles into giving us the time of day. Thankfully, combat is the one element you’re taught wholesale.
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Melee encounters feel cumbersome for a while, making use of the right stick in combination with the triggers to execute directional blocks and attacks. Before long there’s a weight and intimacy to it, pulling focus from the battle raging around you to one specific combatant that you’ll carefully observe and gradually pick apart. Ranged offerings are decidedly more typical, though partaking whilst on horseback demands absolute precision and ensures that whilst you’ll waste a lot of ammunition, you’ll land some jaw-dropping skill shots to be proud of.

Storming strongholds taps into a love nurtured by some of the most iconic scenes in cinema, despite in this instance looking like two bags of potatoes being poured into a toy castle.

Unfortunately, some weapons shatter balancing to the point a single unconsidered blow will lay out almost any competition. When combined with poor artificial intelligence, combat becomes exploitatively easy. Given the right setting - say, a narrow pathway that forces enemies to approach in single file - you can just about take on entire armies single handedly. Similarly, most units become superfluous when you realise cavalry possess a huge advantage; the horses essentially double each unit’s health, meaning they can simply charge in headfirst and win most any fight. The difficulty can be bumped up to somewhat remedy the problems, though it won’t eradicate them.

​By now you’ll have earned the renown not just to converse with nobles, but to be sworn into the service of royalty. Choosing to do so grants a weekly wage, as well as a village to rule and the associated income from its rents. It should be a pivotal moment to breathe a sigh of relief with more coming into your purse than going out, but thanks to the aforementioned exploits they were dealing in small change. When you’re powerful enough to ransack enemy villages without needing to fear the repercussions, money is an almost endless commodity.

​It’s recommended you remain in a king’s service until you’re recognised as having a sufficient right to rule, only then making strides of your own, lest everybody unite to come down on your little uprising like a ton of horse cakes. Accruing that right by finding a fitting spouse and schmoozing with bigwigs just felt like obligatory busywork that hampered the pacing when, militarily, we could have realistically conquered their castles and taken them prisoner.

The gravitational pull of Warband dragged us through the dark hours regardless, defying we put it down like the best strategy games do, before finally rewarding us with the juicy bits we signed up for.

Now a law unto ourselves, we set about inditing large-scale siege warfare to claim swathes of land. It certainly makes you feel like a badass, storming strongholds tapping into a love nurtured by some of the most iconic scenes in cinema, despite in this instance looking like two bags of potatoes being poured into a toy castle.

If you manage to claim and hold everything as your own, which will take some considerable time and dedication, you’ll have done what many thought impossible in uniting the fragmented land in an era of peace. See, you can justify all the bloodshed in the name of prosperity.

Should your cup begin to runneth dry, there are additional wars to be waged in the custom battle and multiplayer modes. Naturally there’s no politicking here, just a range of deathmatch and objective-based game modes that run smoothly on dedicated servers.

Through offering an unprecedented - even intimidating - level of freedom to the player and populating the world of Calradia with abundant emergent gameplay events, TaleWorlds Entertainment bottled an addictive formula that will enthrall for countless long play sessions should you give it the chance. At a budget price, Mount & Blade: Warband provides immense value for money that goes a long way to excusing the archaic AI and presentation, as well as the balance and pacing issues.

​Pros

• Engaging, weighty combat
• Incredibly hard to put down
• Empowering to establish yourself and grow an empire from nothing
• Unapologetic simulation of medieval life
• Incredible value for money

Cons

• Ugly as sin
• Obscures crucial information
• Poor AI and balancing negate the need for a tactical approach
• Barebones port

Score 7/10