Tag Archives: Steam

Mount & Blade – Warband

  November 10, 2011 - 3:50 pm | Game Reviews, RPG
1 Comment

This is probably going to hurt.

Finally another post-worthy game. I found this little gem by accident when I was fixing a scrapped PC and found it installed after the recovery was done. Before now I’d never even heard

of the game, but boy do I wish I had known sooner.

Mount & Blade – Warband is a RPG like few others. You experience medieval warfare in gritty detail: pit fighting, tourneys, open field battles, village looting and even castle sieges.  Here’s an extract from their website:

In Mount & Blade: Warband, you play as an adventurer in the medieval land of Calradia, a fictional land devoid of magic and high fantasy, instead bearing many similarities to our world in the Middle Ages.

The game offers you a great deal of freedom in this world. You may roam around the map visiting towns and villages, trading, pursuing various quests, taking part in tournaments, or trying out a myriad of other activities.

You will soon notice that the world itself is dynamic. Caravans travel between towns, sometimes being waylaid by bandits; villagers take their goods to markets; armies

Storming the enemy before their bowmen reach that ridge

assemble to move across the land, besieging towns or castles and raiding settlements. Instead of giving you a fixed path to follow,

Mount & Blade: Warband lets you freely adventure in this world. In time, you will be well known in many places as you make friends and enemies with other characters, which in turn will allow you to affect events in profound ways. You don’t need to remain a penniless adventurer, either. You may obtain great wealth and power, become one of the trusted vassals of a king; conquer and own villages, castles and towns; command armies, and if you like, even lead rebellions and replace kings with other claim holders.

And who knows? If you are great and cunning warrior you might one day become the Ruler of Calradia.

The game itself seems fairly simple. Recruit some soldiers, battle bandits and rival factions, capture castles and cities, take part in the dusty arena or the glorious tournaments,  rinse and repeat. Warband takes this simple idea and turns it into a masterpiece.  Every step of the way, even on the most basic settings, seems like a new challenge. You swear your allegiance to a king – he now wants you to fight for him during his war campaigns, but he does give you some income and may even grant you control of a few fiefs. Go at it alone and others will treat you like a bandit. Denounce your leaders and start a new kingdom and everyone will be at your throat, unless you can convince them to grant you a peace treaty.

Castle sieges!

Once you are a ruler, things get even tougher. You have to balance out warring other factions, improving your cities, keeping your vassals happy (which is a doozy) and a myriad of other things. And just when you think you have everything under control, expanding your territory at a nice pace, a vassal will denounce his loyalty to you to join your rivals. Of course he’s kind enough to take all the lands you gave to him with him, leaving a gaping hole in the defence you thought was air-tight.

To summarize - Warband came as a total surprise to me. The graphics may be outdated but the sandbox feel of the game, the constantly changing atmosphere and the total replayability makes it a nail-biter. Coming from unknown developers and an unknown publisher (although it is now available on Steam!), this game deserves much more credit that it has received. Even better is the fact that there’s a Song of Fire and Ice (think Game of Thrones) expansion out for it too.

For all you medieval RPG/strategy gamers I’d definitely recommend giving Warband a try. I give 4 out of 5 MisGuilded stars. Just the occasional wonky physics, strange graphic glitches and downright silly AI on sieges prevents this from getting a full score.

Portal 2 review

  June 12, 2011 - 1:41 pm | Game Reviews, Other games, Valve
1 Comment

I finally made some time to play Portal 2 after it sitting in my “to play” queue for what feels like forever. And wow was it worth it! Immediately after installation I set about the promo vids included in the game, which cracked me and my partner up. I should explain – she’s a total non-gamer and usually has no interest in computers beyond work, but I found her sitting behind me watching as I play, pointing out things I might have missed. Or listening to the dialogue and giggling. Even when I got stuck at key points, I’d call her over and she’d be able to help me out.

Ohhai GLaDoS - Long time no see.

Anyway, to the game, which like all Valve productions is available on Steam. After the original Portal my hopes were high, and I was not disappointed. The game stays true to the theme, and there is a much stronger drive toward a decent plot this time. Without divulging into too much detail to give away the plot, here’s the basic outline of the singleplayer campaign: You start off as your old self again, having somehow been recaptured and kept in stasis for an unknown length of time. Something goes wrong in the world in general and your manservant robot helps you escape your cubicle… back into the now abandoned test chambers. Everything is in a state of disrepair and you fight your way through new obstacles caused by the devastation above ground. Your manservant promises to help you get out of the test facility… but first you need to get past your old friend GLaDoS. I’ll leave the rest of the plot for you to discover, but be assured that the adventure is much longer than what you’d expect, and much more complex than in the original.

The graphics are top-notch, as could be expected by a Valve release, and the music wonderfully changes tone to indicate successes, keeping the atmosphere very much alive. The characters are also much more fleshed out, and there are many more than in the original. The humour portrayed in Portal 1 is also continued and improved upon, giving endless mirth through the dark wit, eccentricities or just plain madness of the cast – ranging from your robot saviour to the previous masters of the test facility to a potato… Yup, a potato. Play the game and find out. As always, your companion cube makes a comeback, but is not as deeply tied to you as in the first game.

The game opens up the story of the test facility, giving you insight into the dark past of the Aperture corporation and as always, giving reference to Black Mesa in delightfully humourous ways. The puzzles are as challenging as always, and the solutions are not always immediately apparent until you sit back and take in the entire scenario. Some of the solutions are so simple once you know what to do that you can’t believe you’ve been sitting for twenty minutes without a clue. If there is one complaint, it’s that occasionally there will be a puzzle so obscure, with no hint as to where to go next, that the game may slow down – leaving you feeling dejected. But once you finally figure it out, the flow keeps you enthralled. The addition of new tools at your disposal opens up a variety of new ways to solve puzzles too.

After my first 3 days of playing I have to say I’m very pleased with what Valve has brought to the table, the singleplayer version anyway. I’m yet to dive into the Co-op missions, which I will review once I’ve finish those darned last stages. Their philosophy of releasing the game when it’s ready, as with Blizzard, makes for a polished and superior play. Now if only they would hurry up with the next episode of Halflife already!

Final score: 5/5 MisGuilded stars – a brilliant game that everyone should play.