Mount&Blade - Warband Reviews

Here's a couple of new Mount & Blade: Warband reviews - coincidentally, both with negative views. Diehard GameFAN has a lengthy article, and they question the value and bugs:

There’s a lot to like here, but I’m penalizing the amount of bugs heavily here. This engine is two years old now, it is inexcusable for me to be physically unable to play the game at this point, for any amount of time.

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On to TheGamersHub, with a score of 2/5, though mainly because they can't get over the graphics:

Warband is perhaps the closest example of a gaming industry equivalent to the B-Movie. The budget was small, the production values are low and this stand-alone expansion pack, which allegedly has been given a graphical upgrade over the original 2008 game, looks like it belongs to 10 year old technology. I will admit that it is not typically a game I would choose to play, solely because despite my conviction that graphics do not make a game, I’m still a bit of a pixel snob. High budget RPGs like Fallout 3 or any Bioware title are more my bag. But in one respect Warband walks all over these titles. And that respect is the completely insane level of open-endedness offered in its story.

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More information.

The the first review raises reasonable concerns, but gets bogged down in trivialities. However, it does describe much of the gameplay and some technical issues. The second review says next to nothing about the gameplay and engages in irrelevant comparisons to other games.

Overall though I am disappointed about the lack of progress in M&B. Maybe I just burnt out around the 0.8 period, but the potential of the engine never really seemed fulfilled. It's a fantastic game offering many hours of both unmodded and modded gameplay, and well worth anyone's money, but yet I have a nagging feeling it could have been so much more …

I love m&b but totally hate warband , archery sucks ( arrows do not fire from your bow and do not go where your bow points lol ), spears are terrible ( spine breaking movement only and you can not front / side stab as in original) , swords are swinging the way Bjon Borg used to serve and have minimum reach.

Also the stupid points of original are not fixed

*Archers running out of arrows ..wtf i wanna play an archer
*Horses can get killed , so very realistic but i want to play a MOUNTED archer , having MOUNTED troops and fight against MOUNTED enemies , killable horses are pretty much concept defeating
*Horses are having way too much power in charging troops, remember it is a horse not an elephant , even a charger is like twice the size of a man , terrorising a shield wall is stupid and unnatural
*Cities have way too little money .
*Loot is crap , even compared to original is terrible , i kill 20 riders in uniforms i expect to loot 20 uniforms .
*Lords / companion relations are just terrible
*I so love to when i need 20.000.000 experience points to add +1 skill , not
*Battle AI is terrible , soldiers are not doing what i command .
*You have to train your troops while lords are receiving trained reinforcements , this is outrageous AI cheating
*Inventory even when maxed is inadequate , can you imagine Temujin marching into India with only 50 slots for food?

i can go on