It's a deep beast of a game, and for anyone that has lamented the lack of an open-ended roleplaying game since the days of The Elder Scrolls: Morrowind it will come like a gift from above. The thing is, that if you press on - and I think you should - Mount & Blade: Warband offers a lot more than what meets the eye. It won't take long before all of this becomes clear, and it's somewhere around this point that you either put the game away or you press on. While the controls are pretty standard in the way they are set up - left mouse button for swing, right to defend yourself, etc - the way they work together can be a struggle to learn. The character models are pretty wonky, the animations can hardly be called fluid and the environments are far from the high-resolution wonders of texture work that we might expect from a game released in 2010. Mount & Blade: Warband, just like the original, is not a very pretty game if you judge it from a modern standard. Let's get the bad part out of the way first, since it will be pretty obvious from the minute you start the game. I am not sure it's because it's a good upgrade to the original game, or because I've grown older and more mature (I am betting it is the former - I don't feel one bit more mature) and have an easier time to look past the sometimes rather lacking gameplay of Mount & Blade. In many ways, I'm glad that I get to follow that review - which still scored a healthy 7/10 - with this review of Mount & Blade: Warband, because this time around I'm enjoying myself a lot more. It's how it goes with games like Mount & Blade - they are not easily accessible and might turn away a lot of people, while the players that stay usually do it because they fall completely in love. My comments about the game's lacking graphics were not appreciated, and someone accused me of reviewing a beta-build of the game (which I didn't, considering I had the boxed copy.). While the initial comments were pretty nice, as I started to get ready for this particular review I went back to my original article (only available in Swedish, sorry) and noticed that a whole bunch of angrier readers had turned up since I last looked. And niche products tend to draw out the more furious fanboys from the pack. After all, Mount & Blade was - and is - a pretty niche product. When I reviewed the first Mount & Blade, I decided to warn the readers in advance that the more hardcore of the players would probably not agree with me.
While everyone and their grandmother (and probably their dog at some point in the future) can set up a blog and start writing about video games, it takes a particularly thick skin to tackle some of the comments you might get.
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