Mount & Blade Review
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During battles, it is very important to keep tabs on your party members. Since the game aims more for realism and does not have staples such as healing potions and instant heal inns (a stay at an inn in Mount & Blade only increases recovery speed rather than granting instant full recovery), you had better make sure your troops don't get hurt or killed. Keeping their morale high, their bellies fed, and their wages paid will insure their loyalty to you. People can be recruited from towns and villages, but if you so want to, you can be a lone adventurer without a party. There are probably even ways to play the game with minimal fighting, but I never tried that since the combat was the best part of the game and the game itself was pretty boring when I wasn't fighting.
The standard WASD, mouse, and hotkey control scheme is not complicated and the menu interfaces are navigable. However, control itself left something to be desired. Movement was often stiff and clunky and did not make for fun combat. Riding on horseback was also more clunky than on-foot movement because the former used a character relative "Resident Evil" style control scheme and the latter was standard. I also felt that the camera did not pan as smoothly as I would have liked and often got hung up on walls and obstacles. This allowed some enemies to get cheap hits on me during combat. One positive aspect I should note is that the game was pretty stable and I did not encounter any game crashing bugs. Considering how buggy modern PC releases can be and the need for update patches, it's nice to play a PC game that pretty much works correctly right from the start, graphical glitches notwithstanding.
