War of the Roses

So yeah. War of the Roses? Totally like Mount & Blade. But prettier. Which I guess is fine?

It has essentially the same system of momentum based combat in which the damage you do is dictated by the speed at which you swing your weapon, which is increased or decreased by things such as whether or not your moving and your relative position to the guy you're hacking at.

You can swing your weapon in many directions attempting to slice a dude up.

The dude in question can easily block these attacks with a shield, but things get a bit more complicated if they're without one in which case they need to predict where the attack is coming from and block in the appropriate direction. It's difficult to do, but you feel totally bad ass when you manage to pull it off.

As far as weapons go there's your typical assortment of swords, clubs and axes.

As well as a small array of various polearms and spears. These can be quite devastating, but they require a higher degree of accuracy in that you only do damage with the head of the weapon. The "pole" part of the polearms don't deal damage, so just swinging willy-nilly won't likely do you any good.

There's also bows and crossbows.

I've not dabbled with the latter so much. They require a rather lengthy reload time, but I suppose they're more damaging and potentially more accurate. Though bows clicked a lot quicker with me. They require a little more effort as far as aiming goes in that you've really got to account for drop and distance, but they're quicker to reload so if you get good you can really pepper the enemy with shots.

Not checked with the crossbow bolts, but there are at least also an assortment of different arrows with different effects such as armor piercing or makes it more likely to score a shot that causes the foe to bleed out, which especially if they're in the middle combat and don't really have the time to bandage themselves can prove rather devastating.

The game has a progression system. You have a few prefab loadouts to start with but as you compete you'll earn XP and gold. You earn XP to unlock the various perks, weapons and armor and then you use the gold to actually buy them. And of course you earn XP by killing guys, knocking them out, executing them, healing teammates and capturing objectives. It's well worth looking into making your own custom loadout as they offer a larger variety of weapon and armor choices, not to mention horses. Horses are cool.

And speaking of currently there are only two gameplay modes.

Team Deathmatch which is quite self-explanatory and Conquest which is a sort of Battlefield style, point capture game. I believe they've said they'll support the game post release with additional maps, but I'd hope maybe a new gameplay mode or two would be considered also.

About the only thing I miss when you compare this game to Mount & Blade which if you've played that game you inevitably do is the single player sandbox. that game gives you to mess around in. It was super satisfying to round up a mob of swords for hire and go about pillaging the place, but all this game has in terms of single player is the tutorial.

But as much as I miss that component, what the game does it does well and it's not like there's a load of other games that do it so I'd say it's well worth a look.