Crash! Bang! Wallop! Sounds like the start of a child’s book or someone giving examples of onomatopoeias… OR it could be what I heard every single intense second on Tale World’s brand new expansion to their sleeper hit Mount and Blade series. Is it as good as the original? We’ll see. Is it as buggy? You can damn well count on it. Will it get just as much as a cult following? Was that a rhetorical question? OBVIOUSLY.

 

Mount & Blade...

 

Oh man, M&B we’ve been a far way. I’ve already racked up 149 hours on the bloody thing and it’s counting by the day. I can’t stress enough: If you’ve never owned or played a Mount and Blade game before you must read on. No, really. I can force you.

 

A quick recap on the M&B series and what it’s about before I go onto the DLC, since all those newbies out there won’t know what the sacred Jebus I’m talking about half the time. Let’s call M&B Mabe, so I don’t have to keep pressing the bloody 7 key. So Mabe started with the original game, which was buggy and generally considered a good adventure RPG with some major issues such as crashes, no multiplayer etc. The game put you into either a third person or first person perspective (depending on your preference) onto a battlefield in the medieval ages. You command an army that you’ve built up through the campaign’s isometric map (though this doesn’t concern the Napoleon DLC – another time, another article) and battle it out with dukes and kings to seize territories. The combat was in real time and troops fought beside you, defending queen and country in a brilliantly exhilarating combat experience. Then Tale Worlds pulls Mabe: Warband out. It has multiplayer, full mod support, a good community, frequent updates, better graphics etc. THEN Tale Worlds releases Mabe:  With Fire and Sword. This is considered to be the weakest of the series, being the first game to introduce gunpowder. Of course, it’s not fully balanced and you can just get shot to pieces within 10 seconds of starting the bloody game (I’m not even kidding). So Tale Worlds must see that the gunpowder route is a difficult thing to balance, plus it adds a lot more content that has to be added to the game such as barricades, modern castles and such. Any other developer would say “f*** this, I’m going to stick with my strengths and make another sword and shiz game.” Of course, Paradox publishes with some of the best. And so, they made Mabe: Napoleonic Wars DLC.

 

So as you would have guessed, Mabe: Napoleonic Wars DLC focuses on the Napoleonic Wars between France, Russia, Britain, Wikipedia is your friend etc. Pitting guns, sabres and bayonets against muscle and bone. It doesn’t end well.

 

The game is exclusively multiplayer, with the only single player option being a skirmish mode where you can fully customize your armies and duke it out on pre-set battlefields. It’s not nearly as meaty as the core game, but a good distraction if you’re waiting on someone or you just want to practice your skills on some A.I. 

No, the focus of Mabe: Nappy is the multiplayer.

 

 

The finest of the English infantry at work

 

It’s what I and other Mabe veterans expected. Tale Worlds raised the cap of available spaces in a multiplayer server from 100 to 250. So that means 125 soldiers on each team. Sounds cool right? 200 people duking it out on a 3D battlefield, swinging, shooting and mauling the shit out of some Frenchies or Swedes. But the real kicker is how damned amazing the combat is. Simply put, your weapon is controlled by your mouse. Right click is block with a melee weapon, left click is swing or shoot depending on what weapon your holding. But it gets more complex. Depending on the angle your mouse is being used at, the weapon arc changes. So say your mouse is hanging to the left, your character will block to the left or swing to the left. If it’s upwards, it’ll do the same. Left, right, up and down. FOUR ways to attack your opponent and FOUR places to defend yourself. Whilst fighting 125 people. Now it’s sounding pretty damn cool, right?  Well there’s more.

 

Players can pick between cavalry, line infantry, riflemen, artillery officers, pipers, drummers. Basically everything you think an army back then could muster, this new DLC has it. The website boasts that 220 historically accurate regiments is just one of the many things they added to diversify the DLC to the previous games. It’s so brilliant! There are a ridiculous amount of units to choose from, each with their own strengths and weaknesses, and they even have interchangeable weapons. Cavalry are fast but large targets. Marksmen can fire and reload quickly, but their accuracy isn’t as good as the rifleman’s, who reloads slowly but has ridiculous accuracy at long ranges. This means that no matter how much you play the game, there’s always going to be a different number of enemy units to fight against. At first you’re fighting off a cavalry charge, the next you’re ducking down behind a building whilst being bombarded with musket-fire. It’s starting to sound intense, isn’t it?

 

Damn the sieges are good

 

Well I’ve saved the best till last. Sieges. In this game-mode, you can either choose the attacking team or defending team. Attacking the fort, defending the fort. Simple. Apart from the fact that both sides have a huge array of artillery that can destroy fortifications and decimate enemy troops and firing steps so the fire-fight never ceases. Yeah, real simple. You can try to storm the enemy walls and run the risk of being peppered by gunfire, or you can spawn as an artillery crewmember and fire rockets at the castle walls, knocking them down and spawning back as an infantryman. The whole experience just gives a huge rush of usefulness and adrenaline. No one is useless in Mount and Blade: Napoleonic Wars. Hell, you can even spawn in as peasants who are effectively meat shields for the main body of line infantry and rifles. It’s fantastic how Tale Worlds has really captured what war was like back then. It wasn’t all organised line battles where men stood there and shoved gunpowder into empty guns, waiting to be shot. They’ve really portrayed it as, to put it bluntly, a clusterfuck.

 

I mean, come on, what game lets you be a bloody infantryman going around shooting peasants in first person in a match with 249 other people? None. Mount and Blade is a unique experience. It’s so obvious. It’s a real shame that a lot of people haven’t even heard of the franchise. Actually, it’s sickening. It makes me feel ill that people haven’t experienced what I’ve felt. Surrounded on all flanks, only a wooden barricade stopping my head from being blown off, facing impossible odds and holding off as many as I can with crack shots and lucky stabs with my bayonet to their filthy Russian chests. It’s just… Why are you making me describe this for you? Why don’t you play it?

 

Oh yeah, probably because you’re being held back by the bugs, graphics, animations, sounds, unstable servers and elitist community. Woops. Well to address them in order: The bugs are being fixed. Hell, Tale Worlds released a patch the DAY AFTER the release of the DLC. The graphics suck. There’s no getting around it. They do the job but they do it poorly, if at all. The animations are equally as terrible. They don’t even reload their bloody guns! They just wave their hands in the air screaming garbled Russian war cry’s that’s clearly been edited to make it sound deeper. Yeah, the sound is terrible. The horses jumping sounds like me when I wake up in the morning. The gunfire sound effects are pretty good though. That’s what matters most, I suppose.  The servers aren’t as much of a problem, it’s most probably me being a derp and joining American servers but there isn’t actually any indication of where the servers are based. So you can’t blame me, right? *sigh*. And the son of a bitch community. God damn, the amount of times I’ve been revenge killed for accidentally shooting an ally, or stealing someone else’s kill. You would think a game all about role playing would be populated by people who are enthusiastic about role playing. Not killing me for my death virginity.

 

But let’s be honest, the pros outweigh the cons. And the game is £7 by the way. £7 for one of the greatest war experiences I’ve had since a battlefield tank shell whistled past my ear back in 2011. I mean, come on. Look at it. 220 unique units? 250 players? Amazing combat? Dozens of roles? Come on! Why are you still reading this crappy article? BUY THIS GAME!

 

@Dan