The meat of long-term play, however, takes place on a larger overworld, where players and their parties are shown as mounted figures on a zoomed-out continental map. Players are quickly taught to navigate towns and speak to NPCs similar to many modern RPGs. Indeed, almost any course of action is open for the taking, limited only by the resources at hand and a character’s stats.Ī brief, optional tutorial takes place to set the mood, starting in the third-person combat mode. With no larger narrative to shuffle players onto some pre-planned ‘epic’ quest and no other goal than to make one’s way in the world, one of the biggest risks to a new Warband player is paralysis of choice. That makes it all the more impressive today, considering so few titles on any modern platform have managed to match it in terms of depth.įollowing an involved character creation process and a brief, text-based Choose Your Own Adventure affair designed to gauge a preferred style of play, Warband throws gamers into the deep end. WTF When do I get to start my own Anarcho-Syndicalist Commune?įor PC gamers, Mount and Blade: Warband is the better part of a decade old by now. LOW Too bad it looks like a PS2 game, though.
HIGH Elegantly awkward combat in a deep open-world RPG. Come see the violence inherent in the system!
