A legitimate Game of the Year candidate.
Imagine, if you will, a porn movie gone horribly wrong as Oblivion, beautiful but naive girl that she is, finds herself in a dark alley and menaced by a pack of dudes with bad intentions. World of Warcraft, Sid Meier's Pirates, and Medieval 2: Total War have their way with her and not long thereafter Oblivion gives birth to the collective offspring of all of the above. What do we get from this unnatural coupling (aside from a therapy bill)? Only the best game of 2008, a Massively Singleplayer Offline RPG called Mount & Blade.
It is perhaps instructive to point out just which elements of the abovementioned games have made it in here. From Oblivion we get the wide-open world, the skill-based character progression, and the gritty realism in the graphics. From World of Warcraft we get simplified one-click combat and the straightforward "get X number of item Y for your reward" quest mechanics common to MMORPGs everywhere. Pirates adds in its notions of service to a king, free-roaming trade possibilities, and the idea that the player is but one part of a living, breathing world that went on before he showed up and will go on after he leaves. Finally, Medieval 2 adds a squad-based combat interface that makes every army battle and siege into the sort of "issue orders and watch the mayhem" strategy game that is the Total War series' bread and butter.
Plenty of games claim to offer a true sandbox but Mount & Blade delivers on that promise in spades. You start out as just a guy on a horse freshly arrived in the land of Calradia. From your opening position you can recruit yourself an army and immediately try to make an impact in the world. While the overworld map may look like any sort of RPG boilerplate, there are no monsters, magicks, or any other fantasy conventions here. Every opponent is human, distinguished only by the power of their equipment and the level to which their skills have developed. It's a lot easier to fight five stray looters, for example, than it is to fight the King of the Rhodoks and his personal royal guard. Bearing this in mind and also bearing in mind the fact that if you don't put an army together you're going to be at the mercy of every shoeless mendicant with a knife that happens by, the army you recruit will play a huge role in just what sort of adventure you have. Even a merchant will benefit from having a pack of well-trained and loyal footmen at his service if only to sow fear in the hearts of those very same bandits. You can't die in this game, although if you lose a battle you're pretty much out your army and most of your stuff and building back to the point you were once at can be frustrating enough that you'll want to do things right the first time.
If merely wandering does not constitute your idea of fun, you can pledge allegiance to one of the five factions' kings and set yourself up to get involved in the wars that constantly rage across the landscape. Joining a war party means you get to partake of the spoils of victory and also means you get to be granted a fief of your own to develop and strengthen as your own personal citadel. This also grants you the benefit of a steady income as you get to collect taxes from the peasants to fill your own coffers. Indeed, most of the game's most lucrative and powerful events are only opened to you once you've pledged allegiance to a king, making the loss of freedom often well worth the while. This, however, has to be weighed against the fact that if the war goes badly for your chosen nation you'll be in a bad spot as far as your freedom of movement is concerned.
On the technical side, the game is not going to win any awards for its visual or auditory prowess; Mount & Blade was developed by a small team in Turkey on a shoestring budget and therefore does not have the rich, stunning visuals or outstanding voice acting common to modern games. This, however, proves to be a good thing, as there's no repetitive voices to break immersion, no computer-breaking system requirements to slow the frame rate to a crawl, and most importantly almost no bugs since tight control of the codebase means that the features implemented in the game are able to work as designed. In an age where PC games require patch after patch after patch and often end up even after the last version in a horribly unfinished state, Mount & Blade has the polish of an older game even a scant three months after its initial release.
The game also benefits from using a very customer-friendly DRM scheme; download the game from Taleworlds.com and you get the entire game world as a demo, limited only by your character's maxing out at level 7. Buy a license and you simply input the code in, get the level limit removed, and go on your merry way. Buy the retail box and the only activation it requires is a quick phone-home to verify the CD key; with purchase you also get a code that will add the game to your GamersGate account with publisher Paradox Interactive and allow you to download it to any computer you own. Developer TaleWorlds even thought of the principal objection to even this nonrestrictive protection; on their website they explicitly state that if they go out of business they will release a cracked version of their game, and you can bet that any future abandonware site will mirror that download. This is the sort of gamer-friendly practice that makes me all the more willing to suggest a buy of such an excellent game.
BOTTOM LINE: Mount & Blade is open-ended fun. Players who need linear handholding and who are a bit overwhelmed by a game that throws you in the deep end and says "here's the world, do what you will" might be put off by the lack of goals, but anyone who wants a deep, satisfying, immersive experience will love the game.
RECOMMENDATION: Download the trial version at http://www.taleworlds.com and see what you think. Or just go on GamersGate, plunk down $25, and start playing with no restrictions.
