The Bannerlord

 They pulled me back in!

I am a sucker for a fantastic story. Aren't we all? The stakes of a well crafted narrative that unfurls gradually before snapping up and capturing you in it's web, spinning endless tales of daring exploits, twisted relationships and heart wrenching pathos! It's one of the reasons why Baldur's Gate 3 did so well, it had such a robust and malleable narrative that anyone could play around with empowered by the special video game sauce of having the potential to do literally anything with those beats and make the narrative all your own. That's all we ask for in our games. (That isn't too much, is it?) But sometimes I don't have the brain space to dedicate to a whole other universe with characters and stakes and narratives and finales. Sometimes I just want to kick up my feet, slap on some noise on the screen and live in a world that is as in depth or as vapid as I want it to be at that given time. It's at these points I would love to spend my time playing Destiny, but given how Bungie are so revolted by the idea of new-players joining the ecosystem that they actively design their games to sabotage them- guess I'll stick with Sandbox RPGs.

Sandbox RPGs are great in the way that they combine the ultimate freedom of a story-free adventure game where you can travel the game world, do anything and be anyone; with the somewhat structured progression inherent in a solid RPG game system. Do you want to be a trader who goes from town to town pawning off goods here and buying some to take over there? You sure can, but you'll slowly get better at doing it as you go, telling the naturally evolving story of a gifted tradesman learning their craft and dealing with the troubles of the road in the journey. Simply bliss, right? Of course, most Sandbox RPGs have some idea of how they want you to experience their game and world, but the beauty of the subgenre is the ability to spit in the face of the architects and play however the heck you want to. That is why I come back to the Mount and Blade games again and again.

Not just Mount and Blade, I hasten to add. Space Sims have their place in my mind as well, as long as those space sims don't cost several thousand pounds in order to 'buy in': Star Citizen. (Squadron 42 does look sick though, very surprised with what they've put together over there.) But something about the Mount and Blade formula is just that right level of janky, unwieldy mess and thoughtful medieval simulation that tickles my jimmies. Originally released back in 2008 by the Turkish Developer TaleWorlds, the game was conceived to simulate the trade, management and tactical warfare of the swords and steel era of man, set within a fictional continent that at one point was going to have zombies and necromancers before clarity struck the development team and a semi-realistic direction was settled on instead. (Damn, this game was so ahead of it's time they both almost fell into the 'Survival zombie' niche of the 2010's and managed to mature past it into our current age- innovators I tell you.)

But at the end of the day Mount and Blade is really just a game about first person Medieval battles where you smash through a shield wall of fleshy humans with your giant armoured horse and gleefully chuckle in the crunching of bones and flying of heads! Actually there is no decapitation. Or bone crunching SFX. (Missed opportunity, I tell you!) But the immersion is certainly there in those moments when you're charging at a giant rolling cloud of approaching cavalry, Warhammer primed for a preliminary swing! Or staring up at the parapets of the fortress you are scaling watching arrows rain back and forth. The game ain't the prettiest in the world but damn if it doesn't nail all the right vibes that you would be looking for an experience like this. Just goes to show that graphics aren't the whole cake, they ain't even the icing sometimes.

Where Mount and Blade really impressed was with it's melee combat, which remains one of the best systems ever invented for medieval battles both for it's simplicity and it's engagement. Basically, it's just a four directional system where a weapon can be swung overhead, underarm or to either side, with the type of weapon (blunt or sharp) and the locational damage calculating up how much damage is being done. But the elegance is in the movement. By default the player just needs to push their mouse in the direction before swinging and the attack will come from that direction. Look up to do an overhead, look down to go underarm. Blocking just means matching those directional strikes with a well timed block. It's intuitive, it works. In fact it works so well that Mount and Blade has been recycling it time and time again ever since they originated the system- and there's plenty of Medieval fighting games since that owe something of the Mount and Blade framework for what they'd make of themselves. (Even Ubisoft's For Honor owes some blood to TaleWorlds.)

The latest iteration of Mount and Blade, entitled Bannerlord, utilises many of what made the original games so endlessly replayable and brings them into a slightly more stable and pretty package. Bannerlord still isn't anyone's idea of a 'good looker' when it comes to raw graphical prowess, but their is a rugged beauty in the musty fog drifting above a battlefield swamp or the glittering light settled on a lake moments before a dozen cavalry crack that perfect mirror. And the character models look less like unevolved primal apes, so that at least is a step in something of the right direction. Aside from that Bannerlord is functionally the exact same sort of game as the 2008 predecessor. Which really goes to show the staying power of the little cult classic that could, no?

My favourite memoires are the game at it's most hectic, caught in the middle of giant city siege in a moshpit of swords and hammer where everyone is cutting at everyone else with reckless abandon. But there's something to said about the tactical moments too, when you're in a huge battle, two hundred men weaker than your opponent, and take command of a cavalry strike force- cutting away at the enemy force one formation at a time until you turn those heavy tides. There's very few games that can propose 30 minute long battles whilst keeping the tension taut, and Bannerlord can count itself amidst the few! Whether the cycle of fighting an endless war in which the micromanagement is more likely to overwhelm you before the difficulty does is your cup of tea comes down to the amount of patience you have, I suppose.

Mount and Blade really has longer legs than most to still be somewhat relevant, if within it's niche, in the modern day after all these years- and for a game originally conceived and constructed by a husband and wife duo that is a legacy worth hanging up on the wall as a trophy. There's a timeless appeal to a game like that, one you'll find in Minecraft or Stardew, that worms into your mind and stays there totally naturally, without needing to hook you in the desperate and predatory way that Live Services fall over themselves to do. So if you ever find yourself wondering what it would be like to be part of a castle siege, and balk at all the intimidating looking 'total simulation' medieval games out there with their sweaty online leaderboards and mile-tall barrier to entry, then you could do a lot worse than slapping down a few bucks on a classic in it's own right. Grab a mount and don that blade.