[quote name='RollingSkull']Mount and Blade was a tremendous disappointment for me. The combat is fun for the first couple of hours but after a while big army battles just feel like canned animation spamfests. The melee is much better done in Dark Messiah anyway.
And everything outside of the battles? COMPLETE trash. Quests, overworld, economy, the enemy lords constantly respawning with armies 3 times your max size no matter how often you whup them, nothing you do matters. You have no impact on the world other than occasionally changing colors of the castles to your team's and burning villages whenever you need money.
That said, try the demo. It's the whole damn game with just a 7 level cap. For $5, it is decent and I might have even bought it myself, but don't think you're supporting something amazing here.[/QUOTE]
Agreed 100%. I bought this a long time ago, and while I do think I got $5 worth of amusement out of it, the experience seemed to actually get worse the longer I played it. It feels like less of a game and more of a tech demo for some indy project.
I honestly don't think the combat is all it's cracked up to be. When you're first starting out and having small skirmishes with a dozen men or so on each side, it seems promising, but the experience doesn't scale well. When large armies encounter each other, it basically devolves into a cluster
of hundreds of men running into each other while trying to find a nearby enemy. There's some limited control for tactics, but by this point, you'll probably just ignore them and ride around, taking out enemies one by one.
Outside of this, there are elements of RPG and management games, but everything is tuned so poorly that you'll certainly want to mod the game to avoid having to grind for 100s of hours just to build an army that's still only a fraction of the size of the NPC armies. The actual content is lacking, too. I realize they're going for a big sandbox experience, but this is a little too sandboxy for me -- all of the characters and places are completely generic, and it doesn't really feel like anything you're doing has any impact on the world.
I haven't played in a while, so it's possible things have improved. The overall premise is nice, but it just wasn't executed well. I may revisit in the future to see if it evolves into something interesting, but while I don't regret paying $5 for this, if I had the chance to buy it again I'd probably pass for now.
