Move aside Turkish Star Wars! A new cultural icon may very well supplant you! Its name is Mount and Blade, and it is easily the most innovative RPG in a long time.
Mount and Blade is not your standard fantasy affair. There is no magic. There are no elves and dragons and other mystic mumbo-jumbo. You don't even have healing potions for chrissakes. What you have is a combat system that does a rather accurate job of simulating medieval combat.
And what a combat engine it is. You are an individual character that can either fight on foot or mounted, with a wide variety of weapons ranging from swords to lances, each with their assorted strengths and weaknesses. Most weapons have a variety of different ways to attacks, from stabs to sideswings, and learning how to parry and overcome your opponents' parry ability is key to survival. The game engine takes relative velocity into account when calculating damage as well, so a sword attack made while running (or galloping) past a foe will do more damage than one made while standing still. It truly is a satisfying feeling to take a longsword and ride past an enemy column of archers, hacking them down where they stand.
The coolest ability though comes with the ability to use lances. You can attack with them by thrusting as normal, but the real damage potential comes from then you do not use the attack button. If you simply build up enough speed, you'll "couch" your lance in front of you and if the lance manages to contact an enemy while you ride past them, you'll do obscene amounts of damage (in one case, I one-hit KOed the Lord of Swadia by attacking him head-on. The relative velocity factored in for an obscene amount of overkill).
Combat aside, the rest of the game is standard open-ended RPG affair. You travel between towns, castles, and villages either performing deeds as a hero, or being an utterly ruthless bastard. If you wished, you could take an army and use it to raze towns and cities to the ground, or re-establish them as your own personal fiefdom. Lords and Kings give randomly generated quests, as do assorted small villages (such as freeing a village from bandits), while one can hire a relatively large party of hirelings dependent upon your Charisma and Leadership scores (in the trial version, I had an additional 31 horsemen following me into battle), and as one levels up in the ability to command troops, the battle sizes can potentially reach the hundreds on both sides. It is truly an epic affair.
I would recommend anyone with the slightest interest in fantasy gaming look at Mount and Blade. It's available as downloadable shareware at http://www.taleworlds.com, where you can play until your character reaches level 6, after which one pays for registering (something I'm considering doing in the near future), yet with Paradox Entertainment recently acquiring rights to the game, it's supposed to have an on-store release in Q2 of 2008 (meaning very soon).
07 Apr 2008, 10:12 pm
