The world of Caladria isn’t a fantasy world as this isn’t a swords and sorcery type of game. There’s no magic here, only the grit and grime of armored men knocking each other silly. Caladria is a dynamic setting composed of five competing, fully realized kingdoms, and by “fully realized" I mean that each kingdom is a well-defined feudal society of towns, castles and villages. Each settlement has some kind of lord in charge of it and that lord owes his allegiance to that kingdom. If you've ever read the George R.R. Martin Song of Ice and Fire novels, then you've got a sense of what this game world is about. Lots of factions, lots of lords traveling here and there, and owing to the dynamic nature of this world, there’s lots of chaos.

Throw in a little bit of that old PC classic, Elite, and you get Mount & Blade. The world of Caladria always starts out in the same condition. The cities and villages that dot the landscape always start off as part of the same kingdom. But where the world goes from there varies from game to game. When you’re dropped into it, with literally no guidance of what to do or where to go, Caladria goes about its business regardless of what you do. You do affect the world with your actions, but in turn, the actions of the world affect you. Kingdoms war and make peace, they take each other’s castles and towns, bandits raid caravans and terrorize travelling farmers, etc. By that same token, you can travel anywhere you want, whenever you want. It’s a bit overwhelming.

I had a college professor who said he’d tell his students he’d do the worst thing a teacher could do to a student: Make them read Moby Dick for the first time. Now, he loved that book, but he understood it was a nightmarish first read and that it only became great upon subsequent readings. Mount & Blade is a lot like that. The first few hours after your arrival in Caladria are difficult to navigate. Where do you go? What do you do? At this point in the game, just pick the second star to the right and ride straight on till morning. It’s as good a strategy as any because it really doesn’t matter. You don't have any allies or adversaries. You're not out to avenge the death of your family. You're not on a quest to rule the world (at least, not really). And you're not hit with a sudden does of amnesia requiring you to find out about your mysterious past. This lack of initial focus may not be a good thing, but once you ride forth, meet a few lords, do some quests for them, maybe help a village elder procure some wheat or a few heads of cattle, you start to make allegiances and friends for yourself. The game foists nothing on you, but it offers a lot in return to the player who can use their own imagination to fill in the blanks.

During my time with the game I've roamed the countryside doing small errands and tasks, amassed a group of 50 or so soldiers to follow me into battle (your solders are paid and get better with experience), had my burgeoning militia wiped out and had to build it up again, became a mercenary for a local lord, taken part in a successful siege campaign, ridden to the rescue of fellow countrymen, become a vassal for the king, rescued a kidnapped girl at the request of a guild leader, stopped and started wars, and been granted fiefdom over a small village that now pays its taxes to me in return for my protection. All that and it feels like I’ve only scratched the surface of what the game has to offer.

As you can surely guess, in the midst of all this questing there is a lot of combat. If you’ve ever wanted to play out being in the middle of a chaotic throng of warring soldiers, a la Braveheart or the initial battle scene in Gladiator then you owe it to yourself to give the game a try. While combat may not quite be on the scale of those movies, at most you’ll find about 100 soldiers involved at any one time, it is every bit as chaotic as you marshal your troops to higher ground or order your ranks of mounted soldiers to charge headlong into a line of approaching spearmen. There is a rock, paper, scissors aspect to the combat, in terms of what types of troops are effective against another unit type, but it manages to strike a fair balance between complexity and fun.

The fighting model, which requires only the use of the left and right mouse buttons, isn’t unprecedented, but it is straightforward, easy to learn, and as you increase the game’s difficulty level, hard to master. It also boasts the single best implementation of mounted combat I’ve yet seen in a game. It’s a great feeling the first time you bowl over a small group of opposing soldiers as you try to impale them with a spear or knock them unconscious with a mace. Just don’t get too reckless or your horse may rear and come to a stop, allowing you to be surrounded. At that point you’re dead meat. The battles quickly degenerate into a chaotic mass of men beating the snot out of each other and it takes both skill and luck to win the day (pending where you set the difficulty).