Thanks to its deep simulation and strategic features, Mount & Blade: Warband is a great game for every lover of the medieval age, provided that you're willing to create your own story as the game won't provide any.

While Mount & Blade: Warband hasn't really gained a whole lot in the jump from PC to console, it's great that such a deep and sprawling game has found a home on new platforms after so many years. It looks dreadful, but scratch beneath the surface, and Warband is an enormously rewarding RPG/strategy/medieval warfare sim-type thing that's becomes more and more compelling the more you play.

The sweeping world map is brilliant, but married by subpar presentation and frustrating AI. [Dec 2016, p.91]

Mount & Blade: Warband features some innovative ideas that many other games in the genre haven't explored. The focus on the political nature of warring countries as well as the actual combat gives players multiple ways to play. It is unfortunate that many of these features are left largely unexplained, though, and they require more than a small amount of trial and error to figure out exactly how to proceed. The steep learning curve and low production values may put many people off, although its open-endedness offers players far more replayability than many other games in the genre.

Mount & Blade: Warband isn't supremely polished and swanky, but it is enjoyable, and there is enough intrigue to keep anyone entertained if they can see beyond its datedness. The fighting mechanics and the horse-riding need overhauling entirely for it to be a great game, but in the meantime, Warband is a good game to spend a few hours at a time in.

Releasing a six-year old port onto the Xbox One without reworking the graphics will probably keep this title from any hope of success and the control scheme shows that this game still feels at home on PC, especially while on horseback.

I can’t overlook all the issues for the console versions of this game. It feels like very little was done to make it a more streamlined console version. From menus, to font size, controls, and more. It looks extremely dated, like something that somehow got shelved in the early 90’s. It’s got a lot of depth, at least more than expected for a game of this visual style and setting. Just everything that tries to shine is muddied with everything else.