Mount & Blade: With Fire and Sword Review - Killing Bandits & Running Away With Tax Money

Going back to a time, when the sword was mightier than the bullet and when weaklings couldn't kill anyone since they couldn't carry swords. You won't find that in Mount & Blade: With Fire and Sword. The addictive yet frustrating world of swords and spears, now includes the fearsome yet unreliable muskets and pistols of the early renaissance, adding a much needed sense of ‘overpowered’ to the already solid combat mechanics of Mount & Blade Warband. Mount and blade: With Fire and Sword is a stand-alone expansion to the Mount and Blade: Warband title. It comes with a new lighting engine as well as some weapons previously unseen in the series.

A World of adventure

From the beginning, you start out in this campaign with nothing but a weapon based on your highest attribute. In my case, a pistol, and off you go to the great world of old Europe, where the Swede’s are at War with the Russians and the Cossacks. Your job is to wander around like a bum (yes, it’s possible to play this game as a ‘Bum’) with absolute freedom in the things you want to do.

It's a huge world. Some what based on Eastern Europe. 

Adding to the immersion, this time you even get to customise your army, however before I get into the details I’ll talk about the new types of men you can hire, that’s right, ‘Hire’. Gone are the days when you face large hordes of inexperienced villagers who have no idea how to even wield a pitch fork against a sword wielding knight(Ed's Note: it doesn't work in real life as well if I may add). This time around, you will be facing hordes of armies with flintlock pistols and muskets instead of just swords who you have basically bought from Mercenary Camps scattered around the world.

This brings me to the point of gameplay, due to the introduction of said ‘new’ weapons; the games difficulty has been drastically. You just can’t tell when some lucky bastard gets a lucky shot from his crappy musket from 20 metres away and shoots you in the chest out of sheer luck. This is replaces obviously getting shot in the face with an arrow which happened sometimes in Mount & Blade Warband. (Who would miss that?)

There's a few new skills now that guns and grenades have been added to the game

Back to the world again, the setting this time is based on the early era of Europe where everyone is fighting everyone else and you're neutral in everything. For some reason, you decided to start your journey to see the world and choose which kingdom you want to join up with, there’s no fixed choice, you just choose anyone or no one. Throughout your journey, you will face bandits, raiders, arsonists (also known as Looters), caravans, scouting parties (who always try to hunt you down if they hate your guts) and even the occasional warlord.

However, the quests this time aren’t as interesting as Warband. You no longer find yourself working as a Hitman for the king of some country. Now you’re a hitman for an entire village (yes I know...it’s funny when I first got that quest). Since most villages are poor, they pay you in livestock (beef anyone). One of the more interesting quest are scouting missions where you visit another kingdom and report back to the King of your said quest giver and tell him about his enemy (also known as spying).

Slavery still plays a big part in the world of Mount & Blade, so expect to become a slave whenever your army isn’t up to the task of winning. It’s strange however that you cannot sell your own slaves unless you have some stats in trading (which made me laugh even more). Now onto the ‘mercs’ in the world of ‘with fire and sword’. It’s possible to hire musketeers, infantry men and cavalry.

Female warriors! You can hire women to fight along side you. This one should have been called Xena

The mechanics of having mercenaries over recruited men means that they come at higher levels and require money to keep their loyalty (rather than just worrying about morale like in warband). The more gold you have, the better their relationship and the lesser the chances of them raping you in the middle of the night (I’m serious). You can also convert prisoners of war to your own side, however, that also requires a little stat point allocation into one of your more un-violent attributes.

Overall, the single player portion remains the same, despite the fact that now, most armies have guns instead of bows and arrows. Regardless of that, it’s still fun and strangely addictive.

Another world

The multiplayer portion of this game offers a lot of the same stuff you find in previous versions of mount and blade, except this time, you have guns and the ability to control a small squad of soldiers.

The guns in multiplayer, aren’t as overpowered as one would believe, they offer excellent damage but at the cost of reload time and accuracy, often you would be shouting “Omg, I swear I aimed at his chest, why the F*** it didn’t hit” and is at best used at close range, which again defeats the purpose of having a gun. Even on horseback, don’t expect to be a cowboy gunmen, getting a hit on someone while riding a horse is a feat worth noting in anyone’s book. So this means, you would obviously find people using old-school swords rather than a high tech flintlock any day.

It's a long way to to the Kingdom of Sweden from here. It'll be a long and dangerous journey

This doesn’t mean that the muskets and pistols are useless, on the contrary, you would still find numbers upon numbers of people wielding guns and firing them in one direction (which is even scarier than arrows flying towards you) as you hear the pellets or bullets ‘swoosh’ past your head. Even carrying a shield into the fray wouldn’t keep you safe for long as the duration from bullets peppering your wooden cover is less than say ‘ten’ shots. Apart from the guns, you also get grenades. In single player, they are probably the weapons that determine if an army of ten can beat an army of 20. In multiplayer however, they are pretty unpredictable, thrown similar to tossing a stone at someone with the exception being the timer on the bomb is as unpredictable as the accuracy of a musket being fired. You never know when the thing blows up. However, that doesn’t mean they aren’t useful, but they do require some skill in using them.

Melee weapons like swords, have also received some minor improvements from the previous game. Blocking and parrying aren’t as hard to perform now as the game helps you by automatically parrying in the direction where the enemy is swinging or stabbing from. This doesn’t break the game though, but does become more forgiving to newer players.

Firing a flintlock pistol on horse back wont give you the range of say a bow. But you can get really good at it with practise

The new mode in multiplayer brings an interesting new thrill into the game, it’s called ‘captain’ and you basically start the match with a squad of 4 men whose equipment and ‘AI’ (yes, they are robots) is based on the type of equipment you have currently equip. For example if you’re a musketeer, expect your squad to have up to four men equip with muskets and iron hats. As previously mentioned in my review of ‘warband’, multiplayer is definitely the place you would be spending most time at. However, since there’s a lacking of local SEA based servers, you would be looking at servers located in Japan or Europe, but that doesn’t hinder the solid gameplay of the multiplayer community, expect up to dozens of games and even mods.

Guns and Swords

In comparison to its predecessor, Mount & Blade: With Fire and Sword, offers some dazzling improvements to its dated graphics engine, with HD lighting and some higher quality textures for its buildings, however, it doesn’t compare to its gameplay mechanics, having similarities to Warband in a lot of ways obviously without guns. So in conclusion you’re getting just some minor improvements to the overall package and paying USD$15. It would have been nice of this was released as a huge update rather than a stand-alone expansion. However, this doesn’t take away from the fact that it’s as addictive as its predecessor(it's also a lot cheaper).


Pros:

• Improved Graphics Engine, with HD Textures and Lighting.
• Campaign is addictive yet punishing, play it anyway you like and the experience each time is different.
• The new weapons, Guns and Bombs being the highlights.
• Multiplayer Combat mechanics and gameplay experience are still the same as previous games in the series.
• Improved parry system maybe a warm welcome to newer inexperience players.

Cons:

• The new weapons, they can tip the balance of the single player combat due to random bullets instant killing your character.
• Lack of SEA base servers may put off SEA players, expect to find most European/US servers packed with players though.
• Difficulty of single player may put people off as it's not forgiving (once you get become a slave, it's hard to recover from your losses early game)

Verdict: It doesn't pull any surprises, probably worth purchasing during sales for the improvements it's offering over its older brother.