The only thing that you won’t see happen during combat is your player character getting killed. If you’re defeated in battle, you’re merely knocked unconscious. And it’s going to happen sooner or later since there’s no magic healing potions you can quaff to restore health and you can’t take many direct hits before being felled. Once defeated, your men, if the battle is still in doubt, carry you from the field. At that point you can order a retreat or, if you like your chances, order your soldiers into battle without you. If you’re defeated, however, you will be captured and will have to wait for an opportunity to escape. At that point you won’t face any penalties to your skills or character level, but any army you’ve amassed will be gone, along with a chunk of your wealth. From there you’ll have to pick up the pieces and begin again.

What issues there are with the game are relatively minor. The graphics are certainly not going impress anyone. Although, the sound in battle is actually very well done as it’s easy to tell what kind of hit you’ve delivered just from the sound your weapon makes upon impact. It would be nice if there were a bit more variety in certain areas of the game. For example, any prisoners you acquire to sell into slavery are worth the same amount, whether it’s a lowly bandit or a knight. Only capturing other Lords nets you more than a relatively paltry sum. Also, like your player character, the lords in the game are basically immortal. They can be defeated, but not killed. So while the map can change and evolve, the set of players behind all these machinations always remains the same. Quests can also get repetitive. The variety of quest options at your disposal does expand significantly as you progress, but at the beginning you’ll find yourself doing many of the exact same kinds of quests multiple times, especially delivering messages across the realm for very little profit or fun. Other quests could use some tweaking, like one in which you are tasked with following a spy. The problem is the spy you are to follow leaves the town in the blink of an eye and if you or someone in your party doesn’t have the Tracking skill there’s no figuring out to where he disappeared.

Mitigating some of these issues is the fact that TaleWorlds is very proactive in supporting the game. As an added bonus, it is highly moddable and the mod community that has built up around it is both energized and creative. There’s already a host of mods available at the Mount & Blade Unofficial Files Repository that range from changing basic game mechanics, to graphical updates and tweaks, to total conversions.

Where a lot of games start out very broad in scope, it’s often not very long before you realize the pool is only a foot deep. Conversely, this game's open-ended model may feel shallow at first, but the longer you play it the more the game world opens up, which makes Mount & Blade more like diving in the ocean: The further out you go the deeper it gets. And that’s very refreshing.

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