Mount & Blade: With Fire & Sword Review
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Guns and Other Features With a new era comes more than just an overhaul in backstory and appearance. The most obvious addition of this title is that of guns, albeit fairly primitive guns that take ages to reload. In the mid-17th century, we're talking about flintlock pistols and muskets, that pack a wallop but are very hard to aim accurately and take ages to reload. Additionally, SiCh has added grenades, whose destructive power is offset by their incredibly high price.
Guns are a game changer in the way combat works. While a cavalry charge in Mount & Blade would cut through waves of arrows and reach the lines with few casualties, a line of musketeers will mow down cavalry-men like nobody's business. This makes it absolutely vital to have musketeers of your own, and this in turn makes the old (for glory!) charge of M&B impossible. Even if you gather an all-cavalry group, the fact is that any chance bullet can take you out even when you finally get better armor. This reduces your role to more careful and in the background rather than the crazy man leading the charge, if the latter was your style of play in M&B it certainly was mine. What's more, this adds a high level of chance to fights as it feels very random whether or not you get knocked out, especially early on, and in sieges a perfectly executed siege can be ruined by a lucky shot when fighting goes to the streets or castle.
The developers also changed how a lot of the other equipment works. Crossbows are gone, as is the power throw skill for throwing weapons its place taken by grenade skills. Bows are there but significantly less important since they only deal a fraction of a gun's damage. Heavy armor of M&B's type (full plate) is very rare, and most people move around in lighter armor. Equipment in general is more expensive and harder to get, add to which the fact that there are no more tournaments in With Fire & Sword and you basically need to own a town and some villages to get enough money for serious upgrades.
The locations have been overhauled some, with more upgrade options and officials you can appoint. Towns with the necessary upgrades have a town center where you can put in orders for the game's best weapons, an academy where your followers can be trained, and more. It's a neat expansion to the core of M&B, though for some reason they didn't take along Warband's (investing in a local business) feature.
To offset the gain in town management design, recruitment has become a bit of a nightmare. You can no longer recruit villagers, only mercenaries from taverns or from special mercenary posts. The mercenaries from the latter can have their equipment upgraded a one-time investment that then works permanently and can become quite powerful, but it is boring as all hell. Gone is the engagement of training up a villager to a knight or a peasant women to a sword sister, almost everyone develops along a very straight (normal), (veteran) and (elite) line. It drains a lot of the fun out of party management.
An addition made by SiCh that works out really well is that of a wagon fort. When you're traveling on the world map and being chased by a force of greater number, you can choose to form a wagon fort, which will start your party in the good defensible position within a circle of wagons they can shoot over. If you just let the AI deal with it from there it's a mess, but properly position your gunmen and the rest of your party and it evens the odds quite a bit. The enemy sometimes tries to do the same when you're chasing them but, as said, the AI is not very good at it. Still, this gameplay addition is a lot of fun, it plays out really well.
And for a final (other feature) under this header, there's multiplayer. SiCh added a Captain Mode to multiplayer, where individual players command a group of bots. It's decent but didn't seem very popular while I was looking for servers to try it on, presumably because controlling a bunch of fairly idiotic bots who you can only give limited commands is not a lot of fun in multiplayer. The strength of M&B's multiplayer still lies in massive battles and sieges with over a hundred players in it. New maps and the addition of guns change the dynamics here quite a bit, but I still had a blast with it.
