Mount & Blade: With Fire & Sword Reviews

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Written by Brother None on May 12th, 2011

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The closest thing to Warband's tense and lucrative arena scraps are squalid pub-car-park fist fights. Most taverns in With Fire & Sword seem to boast a drunk willing to hazard a few coins on a bare-knuckle bout. Accept and you're whisked outside into an empty yard or street for a few minutes of grunty lunging. If these sessions involved a ring of baying locals or occasionally degenerated into mass brawls, they might have been more appealing. As it is, they're pretty tiresome.

In an era when every self-respecting rake had a pistol on his hip, and every self-respecting landlord a cellar full of vodka, it's sad that duels, impromptu shooting contests and drinking games aren't part of the rich tapestry of urban life. Combine the three - maybe mix in a little bear-baiting or Beard Tax collecting, for good measure - and you'd have, well, something a damn sight more interesting than what you have at the moment.

One of the odder omissions is the absence of female player-characters. Instead of the Warband system where you got to choose the sex and back-story of your hero, character-creation in With Fire & Sword involves stat distribution, (male) face sculpting and nothing else. More dye leached from Mount & Blade's bright vestments for no discernible gain.

Basing Fire and Sword around the Warband engine doesn't seem to have gone smoothly either, and while some of the expansions Warband made have been carried over, there are some exceptions. There's no option to build your own kingdom, for example, as the singleplayer end-game has been boiled back to that of the original Mount and Blade.

The multiplayer improvements have been carried over, at least, with players able to involve themselves in brutal sieges and CTF matches where a single hit is usually enough to knock you out of the battle. There's a new multiplayer mode too; Captain, where up to 16 players are divided into teams and put in charge of AI bots who further increase the scale of the conflict.

Much like with past Mount & Blade games, battles are often against dizzying odds and there are some fights you simply can't win, no matter how hard you try - but here, it sure feels like those times start much earlier than in past games. It can be very frustrating, but it is possible to get past the difficulty curve and build an effective army, one that you've trained with your heroes and then carefully equipped through the new Mercenary Camp feature. It's unlikely that many gamers will get to that point, though, as this is an absolutely brutal game - even on the easiest difficulty - but it is satisfying if you can get there. What I'm not so sure about is whether the addition of firearms actually makes Mount & Blade's brand of combat better. It's possible that the effort on this might have been better spent going into some kind of next-gen sequel, but at least we know that TaleWorlds is also quietly working on something new that they haven't announced - we can only hope that they've got something big coming.

For starters, it feels old. And I'm not talking about the game's poor graphics. The litany of upgradeable statistics and perk-like abilities reminded me of a fifteen year old role playing game. Most of the statistics are obscure, and have a minor effect on your character's development, allowing for an ultra-tailored character designed exclusively around your play style. This runs differently to the direction of most Western RPGs today, where character skill building is still complicated and flexible (see Deus Ex, Morrowind, Fallout 3, Baldur's Gate 2 and such), but more streamlined and with skills that are largely compatible with each other being merged into one stat.

As a result, Mount & Blade: With Fire & Sword feels incredibly convoluted from the moment you open the character creation tool. Not necessarily a bad thing, but when I saw the wide variety of stats I could give my character, my first thought was that I'd be starting again after a few hours to boost my preferred skills.

Seeing as I was a Mount & Blade virgin, I had no idea of my strengths, and just as I'd predicted, a re-roll of my character was necessary. The shooting skill proved utterly useless to me since guns in this game are inherently poor partly to not destroy the swords and bows, but also due to them being very rudimentary gunpowder weapons and I found myself getting slaughtered using them. Switching to other weapons was just as futile, since they didn't enjoy the stat bonuses I'd assigned to my firearms skill.

The ability to play as female character is also gone. Instead of recruiting peasant from different villages and making the soldiers out of these, you can now recruit mercenaries in mercenary camps.

There about 5 camps in the game, each one for the major different factions in the game, and there is an endless supply of mercenaries coming from each of them. You can upgrade the mercenary specific equipment which costs a ton of money but any other mercenary you recruit of that type at that camp will have that bonus.

I feel like this feature should have been retained considering this is what has made Mount and Blade series fun and different. The mercenaries aren't bad either, but still, either completely removing the ability to recruit villagers and training them into soldiers, the developers should have retained along with the option to recruit trained mercenaries.

Although you'll eventually stumble into a unique storyline, a lot of the regular quests which take up the bulk of your time are the same as in previous titles. Raise taxes from a location, escort a caravan, deal with some bandits; these will all be familiar to Mount & Blade veterans. Audio, too, is much the same, with brigand barks and travelling tunes sounding awfully familiar. To top it all off, there's also a selection of niggling bugs, like the inability of your soldiers to navigate the end of a ladder in certain siege locations and an uneven, economy-busting caravan system.

WFaS still has the core of a Mount & Blade title, but it fails to distinguish itself as a standalone game. Everything feels too much like a retread of old territory, and it's questionable whether the addition of guns really benefits the single player combat system. The multiplayer side of things is as excellent as ever, but (Captain mode aside) unless you're eager to roleplay as a 17th Century Swedish musketeer, it makes more sense to just pick up Warband on the cheap and apply a suitable firearms mod.

In my opinion, the best part of this game is the questing element. You begin by yourself as a random traveler in search of work. Because, you know, you need work to afford the accoutrements necessary to be a force of reckoning. To that end, you're given a map of the area, told who controls what, and when sieges are occurring, etc. You're then allowed to choose who, if anyone, you will gain reputation with by doing their dirty work. You can't walk up to any Mayor or Town Elder and ask for work. There are also warlords who will have you do things like collect taxes, deliver messages, or kill the thorns in their sides that they can't otherwise be bothered with. You're given links to people and places in the quest logs, and you can even have the place you're headed shown on the map, click on it, and you're off. Which is nice, because it's a huge map filled with places big and small, and it's easy to get lost. The navigation of the map is very smooth, though, and is easily my favorite thing to control in the game.

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