Mount & Blade: With Fire & Sword Review
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Ukrainian game developer SiCh Studio (named for the historic Cossack capital) recognized this opportunity, and decided to make a standalone expansion based on the Polish historical novel With Fire & Sword. This book is obligatory reading for our eastern brethren, but while I studied Eastern European history in the university the book is not considered essential reading here. Still, the impact of this decision is immediately obvious. It moves Mount & Blade out of the fictional setting of Calradia into real-world history, and jumps it forward in humanity's development out of swords and arrows into a time ruled by guns, and puts in a couple of main storylines related to the book's events.
The Real World
Moving Mount & Blade into an entirely new setting opens up a world of possibilities, but With Fire & Sword only explores a limited amount of said opportunities. A lot of material still feels familiar. The world map is still divided into towns, castles and villages, and offers the same kind of continuous continent, which you can traverse with your party, only by land, never by sea, which is a bit odd when it's 1655 in the game.
With Fire & Sword looks similar to its predecessors in graphical capabilities, but a big part of SiCh's job in making this standalone expansion was to create graphical assets representing the era. A lot of this is immediately noticeable, from the different dress-style (including the very noticeable Polish hussars) to notable buildings recreated in the different cities, such as the lovely St Basil's in Moscow.
The developers a good job of creating a convincing atmosphere here, but I'm left wondering how many people it actually matters for. The tsar's orthodox dress or the little icon corners in the room of a Muscovite lord are neat if you recognize them, and they work to tie the game into a living, breathing whole, but a lot of of the effort in getting right fairly minor details that will be lost on many of the game's players.
The dialog goes rather deep into the historical circumstances of the time. That's not a topic I can object against, but the presentation is sure to test the player's patience. NPCs serve as information dumps of rather meticulously written historical facts that they give you in paragraphs of drab text. Like the graphical assets, it's very precise, but unlike the graphics, it's not engaging at all.
Guns and Other Features
With a new era comes more than just an overhaul in backstory and appearance. The most obvious addition of this title is that of guns, albeit fairly primitive guns that take ages to reload. In the mid-17th century, we're talking about flintlock pistols and muskets, that pack a wallop but are very hard to aim accurately and take ages to reload. Additionally, SiCh has added grenades, whose destructive power is offset by their incredibly high price.
Guns are a game changer in the way combat works. While a cavalry charge in Mount & Blade would cut through waves of arrows and reach the lines with few casualties, a line of musketeers will mow down cavalry-men like nobody's business. This makes it absolutely vital to have musketeers of your own, and this in turn makes the old (for glory!) charge of M&B impossible. Even if you gather an all-cavalry group, the fact is that any chance bullet can take you out even when you finally get better armor. This reduces your role to more careful and in the background rather than the crazy man leading the charge, if the latter was your style of play in M&B it certainly was mine. What's more, this adds a high level of chance to fights as it feels very random whether or not you get knocked out, especially early on, and in sieges a perfectly executed siege can be ruined by a lucky shot when fighting goes to the streets or castle.
The developers also changed how a lot of the other equipment works. Crossbows are gone, as is the power throw skill for throwing weapons its place taken by grenade skills. Bows are there but significantly less important since they only deal a fraction of a gun's damage. Heavy armor of M&B's type (full plate) is very rare, and most people move around in lighter armor. Equipment in general is more expensive and harder to get, add to which the fact that there are no more tournaments in With Fire & Sword and you basically need to own a town and some villages to get enough money for serious upgrades.
The locations have been overhauled some, with more upgrade options and officials you can appoint. Towns with the necessary upgrades have a town center where you can put in orders for the game's best weapons, an academy where your followers can be trained, and more. It's a neat expansion to the core of M&B, though for some reason they didn't take along Warband's (investing in a local business) feature.
To offset the gain in town management design, recruitment has become a bit of a nightmare. You can no longer recruit villagers, only mercenaries from taverns or from special mercenary posts. The mercenaries from the latter can have their equipment upgraded a one-time investment that then works permanently and can become quite powerful, but it is boring as all hell. Gone is the engagement of training up a villager to a knight or a peasant women to a sword sister, almost everyone develops along a very straight (normal), (veteran) and (elite) line. It drains a lot of the fun out of party management.
An addition made by SiCh that works out really well is that of a wagon fort. When you're traveling on the world map and being chased by a force of greater number, you can choose to form a wagon fort, which will start your party in the good defensible position within a circle of wagons they can shoot over. If you just let the AI deal with it from there it's a mess, but properly position your gunmen and the rest of your party and it evens the odds quite a bit. The enemy sometimes tries to do the same when you're chasing them but, as said, the AI is not very good at it. Still, this gameplay addition is a lot of fun, it plays out really well.
And for a final (other feature) under this header, there's multiplayer. SiCh added a Captain Mode to multiplayer, where individual players command a group of bots. It's decent but didn't seem very popular while I was looking for servers to try it on, presumably because controlling a bunch of fairly idiotic bots who you can only give limited commands is not a lot of fun in multiplayer. The strength of M&B's multiplayer still lies in massive battles and sieges with over a hundred players in it. New maps and the addition of guns change the dynamics here quite a bit, but I still had a blast with it.
Quests and the Main Stories
The core of With Fire & Sword's quest system still works like Mount & Blade. Tournaments have been taken out so the only way to get some funds prior to becoming a lord is to do a lot of jobs. Many of these are cut and paste from the original game, the likes of guarding a caravan or finding a killer. Not riveting by their nature but fun because of the way M&B's open world works.
SiCh's biggest addition here are the storylines, three in total. The Swedes and Khans don't get a storyline, and joining them locks you out of other storylines, which devaluates them significantly. The stories (I primarily explored the Muscovite one) are set up as a linear sequence of quests, which unlike most quests are designed to occur involving the predetermined people and towns. The lack of randomness isn't very typical of M&B, but it's refreshing. In the Muscovite storyline I found myself rushing to the Tsar to deliver his horse as bandits kept attacking me to get to it, and at a later stage had a fun single-character stage fighting my way out of a building.
The storylines feel a bit removed from the rest of the game. They don't have any time constraints, unlike every other quest, and as said they are pre-designed. You can tell they were added to the core game at a later date, but for the most part it's not too jarring, it just helps separate the everyday tasks from the main story you're pursuing.
It can clash though. If a town is in an enemy's hand naturally you'll need to sneak in to pursue the quest, but the programming here is a bit wonky, and sometimes the option to sneak in for my business isn't there, or I get stuck in an infinite dialog loop with a slave dealer. In fact, for a game that has been out for quite some time in Eastern Europe this is a surprisingly unpolished release, needing a patch soon after being put on the market just to get followers leveling up. Even a few patches in, it still feels rough at the edges. The biggest problem is the AI/pathfinding in sieges, which sees the attackers bunching up at the top of the stairs, and the defenders standing still on the courtyard, blocking attacks but not attack themselves.
Conclusion
With Fire & Sword doesn't present itself as a full game release, and it's a good thing that it doesn't because a full game it is not. A lot of the meat here is really similar to Mount & Blade to a point where enough is enough already. Still, the changes made are significant, from a whole new setting to a very different combat setup.
Sadly, the whole thing is the quintessential example of a mixed bag. Are guns a good addition? Well yeah, they are well implemented as majorly powerful but hard-to-use items. But no, they kind of ruin the whole close combat experience that made Mount & Blade great. Similarly, the main storylines are really good additions but they're limited to three factions and kind of buggy.
For every yes there's a but for this game. And that means that for people looking to get into Mount & Blade, I would advise the original and its expansion pack. As for Mount & Blade fans, this title is worth it only if the gun combat appeals to you, otherwise one can freely give it a miss. Personally, I can't help but feel it leaves unexplored high-interest opportunities offered by the era, such as ship battles or complex political infighting.
