izigame.me

Mount & Blade is personally the best nostalgic hack and slash war game I've ever played. The game is set during the medieval era on the continent of Calradia where there are 6 kingdoms fighting an endless battle royale. You have the Swadians whose heavy knights love touching grass, Khergits whose horse archers love eating grass, Rhodoks whose heavy crossbow enjoy the high ground, Sarranids whose Tusken raiders love making sand castles, Vaegirs whose twinks make love to sea raiders in the snow and Nords whose chad vikings make love to strangers by the shore. The main point of the game is to build up your warband and kill billions to expand your kingdom.
You first start off as an undocumented immigrant with 3 pennies, a few rags and Dobby's sock for clothes, a butter knife, a slice of beef jerky and ole' bessie your steed. Your first task is to recruit peasants into your warband and then fight a turf war with the local looters, forest bandits, sea raiders and deserters who make an honest living of kidnapping farmers and peasant women. This allows you to level up your skills, companions and troops as well as earn a little bit of pocket change. Once you have a decent force of around 50 men, it's time to appropriate and redistribute the means of production from the greedy peasantry whose sole purpose in life is to be harvested and to recruit their teenage boys in my forever wars. Pro tip: don't pillage villages where you plan to recruit from. I personally go on a biweekly crusade to the Middle East to raid Sarranid villages, earning around $10k while I recruit breedable stock in the West. The population mechanics of this game makes no sense. A random lord can loot and massacre a village and then a week later you can come back and recruit 1-6 peasants. It's like the women of the village fully repopulate it with their sons who grow into adulthood in 7 days. You can also make decent money the fun way by competing in tournaments and then partying with all the daughters of the local lords or the boring way by investing in industry and earning a weekly income.
Combat in this game is hilariously stupid. Field battles are essentially mosh pits where the AI troops charge at each other like it's the beginning of the Hunger Games. If you had any semblance of common sense, you would command your infantry to form the front line, archers in the rear to provide covering fire and your cavalry on the flanks to peg your enemies in the ass. Even if you're heavily outnumbered, I guarantee you would win with basic tactics. However, if you want to put your 2 brain cells to rest, just recruit 100 Swadian knights and they'll trample anything in the field. The only exception in every scenario is against the Khergits whose beta male horse archers run around the entire field like a zebra with a bow and arrow being chased by a lion. The geography is randomly generated and can sometimes be in the worst spots possible. You can spawn in a ravine and fight like the survivors in the insect death pit in the King Kong movie or on top of Mount Everest where the enemy cavalry has to ascend an 80 degree slope with their Skyrim horses as your archers pelt them. Siege battles are on a whole new level of mental retardation. YOU SET UP ONE LADDER AND SINGLE FILE CLIMB TO YOUR DEATH. It's so extremely broken that your warband of 50 country bumpkins and hillbillies can defend any castle against an army of 1000 simply by camping the ladder with your two handed battle axe. The amount of time I spent chopping off my enemy's heads was akin to a factory worker with 30 years experience whose job is to pull a lever up and down 12 hours a day in order to provide a stable single household income with a beautiful stay-at-home wife, a two story house, 2 cars and 4 kids. As an intellectual with 3 brain cells, I instead fight my offensive siege battles with an army of archers. I would pepper the defenders with arrows then retreat once I ran out of ammo. Rinse and repeat until the castle is yours. Sometimes I love to live dangerously and climb the ladder to point blank range shoot the defenders in the face. They can't do anything about it (so long as all their archers are dead) since they can't simply push the ladder down. One final fun part about battles is the prisoners, more specifically the slimy cockroaches that are lords. You can personally impale a lord in the heart with a lance, slice open his guts with a bastard sword, headshot with an arrow and crack open his skull with a battleaxe and HE STILL MANAGES TO ESCAPE.
Diplomacy is too broken to even function properly. When I had enough renown, I became a vassal of the Nords whose king is the worst monarch on the entire continent. You'd have to pray to God that when you get employed as a vassal, your king would recognize your valiant efforts in solo conquering a castle. Instead, the king is a smiling Karen who rewards the lords of the realm with a pizza party for conquering the neighboring kingdom's territory while pocketing the profits, i.e. you receive a letter in the mail of your rejection of a 50 cent raise. I was cucked so many times from owning my first castle that the moment I managed to capture the city of Wercheg and my king demanded I relinquish it to him, I declared independence. Not a day later, he shows up with an army of 800 men to teach me a lesson. Like honestly dude, conquer your own land with that force instead of leeching off a homeless veteran. Anyways, as mentioned above, I chopped my way to victory in the 3 separate attempts to seize my property and then peaced him out. Unfortunately, every other kingdom in their mother saw my city as free real estate and declared war. I had to fight total war against these rats for the rest of the game with the Nord chads as my only recruitable source. Every defensive siege was like the 100th Battle of Stalingrad. The only reason why I can't peace them out, even if I decimate their armies in the field, is an arbitrary number called right to rule which I can't reliably increase if I don't make peace. See the problem here?
Slowly and methodically, I grew my kingdom 1 conquered castle at a time. Occasionally, random lords would get exiled from other kingdoms and end up homeless in my court. I'd employ anyone I could get as vassals to protect my castles and build up the garrison. This was a massive mistake that I had to pay dearly for. When you reward a vassal with a fief, all the other vassals suffer a drastic relation penalty simply out of greed. There were so many lords with negative relations that they eventually seceded from my kingdom, taking their castles with them to another kingdom. I'd then have to reconquer that land, now with a fully replenished garrison. I got so fed up that I exiled all my vassals and shifted to giving new vassals only villages since villages are tied to castles/cities and don't seceded when a lord betrays you. Later on the in game I also noticed all the other kingdoms were having the same problem. It was funny when I went to war against the Swadians and Rhodoks that their lords were Khergit and Sarranid as if these kingdoms were modern day Europe.
It took me 1400 days to fully conquer Calradia, each battle personally fought and won the hard way. It was somewhat difficult in the middle of the run partly due to the vassal situation and also the fact that 6 kingdoms can siege 6 different castles at once while you can only siege 1 at a time. I felt like Napoleon fighting against endless waves of coalitions just to secure peace in the world. I'd personally rate this game 9/10 despite its many flaws. The music, combat and random voice lines are well worth the gruesome total war experience. Would definitely have an "EH?" with your purse-onal belongings, admire that nice head on your shoulders, drink from your skull and have our pay or have our fun while going on a stroll, almost waiting for harvesting season and telling the vile beggar "Oi you there! Stop!"