Mount & Blade: With Fire & Sword review [PC]

Posted May 18, 2011 by Luke Stratford.

For such a small, ugly game franchise, Paradox Interactive’s Mount & Blade series has grown to be more than the sum of its parts. Despite looking like the back end of a poorly-rendered moose and suffering from some cripplingly unfair balance issues, the original M&B – and its vastly improved sequel, Warband – remain horribly addictive and easy to play (if not play well).

Why? The crux of the Mount & Blade titles has always been that there is no grand storyline – just one huge AI sandbox, with various factions intermittently warring for land, dabbling in politics, or quietly doing trade with others. You can do almost anything – I once spent several hours amassing a small fortune just by trading goods between settlements, then splurged on a small army of mercenaries so I could capture a castle I’d had my eye on. It failed spectacularly, but the point was that it let me try.

This is why With Fire & Sword is such a disappointment. Despite having most of the framework in place, much of the work put into this game seems to have been in removing half of the things that made it fun in the first place. So many simple things that streamlined the game, such as being able to recruit directly from settlements, have now been done away with in favour of hiring mercenaries. Granted, the new system isn’t exactly terrible, but it places a significant chokehold on players who suffer a crushing defeat late in the game, when a single footsoldier costs more than you can afford (after spending most of your budget on upgrading them).

My list of complaints seems endless. A lot of what has been copied from Warband hasn’t made the transition well, with shoddy textures, lazy animation and drastically diminished of variety all around. Aside from some small edits to dialogue, most of your interactions with bandits, lords and mayors are the same as before, word for word, and a great deal of what’s been added ranges from the dull to the bizarre. I’m guessing I wasn’t the only one who was surprised when I swung an axe into someone’s face, only to be rewarded with a light-hearted ‘wahey!’.

The game itself fares no better. Gone are the perfectly useful revenue streams of businesses within settlements, to be replaced with micromanaged (and exploitable) caravans. Gone is the option to play as a woman, which greatly affected the way you had to approach conquest in Warband. Gone are the relatively forgiving penalties for defeat – fall to even the gimpiest bandit, and you can kiss all your weapons goodbye, vanished into the ether without a chance of getting them back. Spent several thousand ‘thaler’ on an exquisitely accurate and powerful rifle? Tough – buy another one.

As much as With Fire & Sword deserves a good kicking (and it does – with great big hobnailed boots), I’d be remiss not to mention that it manages to fix several issues that made Warband a chore in some respects. But many of these were either basic issues that should have been picked up on within the first hours of playtesting and fixed. Developers should not have to wait for their players to tell them what’s wrong with their game.

With Fire & Sword isn’t unplayable – it’s perfectly possible to have fun now and again – but this isn’t the follow-up that loyal fans deserve. If anything, this feels like that uncertain middle child between the birth of a great idea and the final realisation of it as a complete experience. It’s baffling that the far superior Warband precedes it. It’s not even worthy DLC. It feels like a third-rate mod project that you have to shell out £15 to play.