Mount & Blade: With Fire & Sword Preview

Having played a level-capped demo, Manapool share their impressions on the upcoming Mount & Blade standalone expansion With Fire & Sword, and appear to be underwhelmed.

The obvious addition to With Fire and Sword is the inclusion of guns. There’s quite a variety of firearms and you’ll even find grenades. We didn’t feel that the inclusion of guns was a positive change at all, as battles change into a ranged stand-off with soldiers firing muskets at each other. You can obviously still charge in, but chances are you’ll be hit by a couple of bullets, and they do hurt! On the flipside, even at level 1 we were one-shotting enemy soldiers with a musket from our horse. It’s not nearly as satisfying as the crossbows or normal bows in Warband or even the original. The combat engine is pretty much identical to the original games, so if you’ve played those a lot you’ll feel right at home. So long story short, is With Fire & Sword an improvement over Warband? In terms of what cities look like, and small improvements here and there: absolutely. In terms of the tutorial or the new weapons: we absolutely hated those but that’s really down to personal preference. Some people absolutely love this time period, so there’s certainly something to be found here if you enjoy muskets. However, With Fire & Sword feels like a mod in all respects and not like a full-blown expansion. It almost feels like this should have been a patch to Warband in terms of improvements, and an additional gamemode/campaign for those who enjoy it. We can’t help but feel that the franchise is being milked a little and we’d really have liked to see more improvements to the engine, the polish and the game in general. All in all, it’s really a little underwhelming and we can’t help feeling a little disappointed with Taleworlds on this one. It’s just not enough of an improvement to Warband to warrant purchase for most people.