Mount & Blade: With Fire & Sword Review
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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.
