Mount & Blade: With Fire & Sword Reviews
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Edge, 6.
As the title hints, Fire And Sword heralds the introduction of a new battlefield leveller. Guns are simple to use aim and shoot but take an age to reload. They should work best as shock implements, but the game's brainless AI turns them into one-stop victory toys. Engaging an enemy force on the campaign screen whisks you to a square of land for a pitched battle. On one side, you with a weapon that kills in one shot and a horse which doesn't tire. On the other, a troop of bandits who'll happily sprint in a straight line directly for the your character, ignoring both the projectiles whizzing past them and the screams of their dying allies.
Unless, of course, the odds are more evenly matched. Fire And Sword is an unforgiving game, and the life of a fledgling leader is harsh. Scraping together gold is a tiresome, thankless task, characterised by repeat letter delivering between cities, and punctuated by regular capture by bandits. If you can avoid larger gaggles of brigands and put together a miniature army the game reaches full gallop, but until that point you're forced to pay careful mind to the campaign map and scurry from any groups larger than yours.
GeekMandem, 9
The multiplayer, for the most part, does a good job of bringing over the fun of the single player combat to the multiplayer stage. It suffers from one major problem however, lag. No matter what game you play it is always a problem. The shooters of the world have been able to correct it with the hit boxes, some being worse than others (i.e. Call of Duty.) However, no one has really tried the close combat sword play with first/third person gameplay on this scale. You can, of course, try to make up for the lag yourself, but the best option is often get a huge two handed sword and swing it like a crazy person. Guns suffer the most due to lag, with bullets being the smallest projectile in the game. Dealing with lag can make hitting an enemy with a gun very difficult.
Ultimately the multiplayer is a flawed gem. There is a lot of potential for greatness and fun to be had, yet it can often be very frustrating at times, especially trying to win as the attacking army in a siege. However, with improved servers and changes to the balancing of certain game modes and weapons, it could become a very memorable experience.
Iron Hammers, 3/5
Other problems arise when playing the single player mode of With Fire and Sword. The UI is clunky and left largely unexplained, presumably because the developers, in their modesty, didn't imagine that the title would gain much in the way of a new audience. It took me a long time to discover the magical tab key, which allows access to the quick town navigation pane without having to manually seek out the person or town area you require. The title's big new concept is that you now have access to firearms, but these don't add much to the game. Just like their real contemporary counterparts, the guns are primitive and unreliable. When they do hit, however, it is entirely possible to one-hit your foe. I find this variance hard to balance in terms of your own character's stats, and also when buying mercenaries with guns. When they work, they rock, but when they don't, gunmen are easily picked off the battlefield.
The multiplayer experience helped me to gloss over the negative, though. Fast play in many different, interesting maps with a whole host of different objectives makes for some very enticing play. I found myself putting much more time into this area of the game. Starting off with a monetary allowance and some basic gear, you quickly buy your preferred items and march onwards. You and your team work towards a particular goal; laying siege on a castle, winning a skirmish on a hilltop or capturing flags from an enemy faction's base camp. The battles feel organic, with enough chaos to put you in the right mindset. You are free to host your own game and password it, so that you can enjoy playing with your friends only. The frantic pace allows you to forget about the less-than-perfect graphics and other discrepancies, making you concentrate on the combat system, testing your skills against real people rather than the slower AI.
The Wargamer goes the scoreless route.
Mount & Blade: With Fire and Sword provides good value for an inexpensive standalone expansion. The major improvement in the game is the firearms and they are balanced well: they are powerful, routinely delivering one-shot kills, but require long reload sequences and aren't effective in melee combat. A cavalryman with a pistol is a force to be reckoned with. Firearms significantly increase the difficulty of the game (despite the same iffy AI): a handful of peasants (or other low-level troops) armed with muskets can easily take down your hero (I resorted to the money cheat early and often to afford enough mercenaries for human shields). I'd like to be able to take all of their muskets (and other weapons) after battle, though, but the post-battle loot is not all-inclusive. Restricting recruiting of allies to taverns and camps means necessary troops are more expensive, making a loss in a battle even more painful on the pocketbook. Mount & Blade: With Fire and Sword includes more siege options in addition to simply storming the castle, and you can queue city improvements to increase income or relations in villages you control. The historical setting alone doesn't really make much of a difference in terms of campaign mechanics, but the single-player campaign (sorry, kids, no online campaigns) does come with more quests and a story with multiple endings. The pleasing chaos of Warband's online sixty-four-player battles returns with a new mode, where you can issue simple orders to AI subordinates for truly massive confrontations. Mount & Blade: With Fire and Sword is more varied than Warband (and at half the initial price), so fans and newcomers alike should check out the latest entry in the franchise.
