The musket (new to With Fire and Sword) doesn’t arc nearly as much and is much more powerful, but most of the muskets in the game are extremely inaccurate and take a long time to load. The bow and arrow is a simple hold-and-release weapon, but it arcs realistically, so you’ll have to aim upward to get longer range. It’s tricky at first, but one can become very good at it with practice. Melee combat is reliant on timing hold down the left-click to raise the weapon, release to attack. You can still fight on your own, but it’s very difficult, and chances are you’ll be taken prisoner by some bandits early on. This isn’t a game in which one can take down twenty enemies single-handedly from the very start of the game, you’ll want to hire mercenaries and soldiers to do the fighting for you.
The game’s main appeal comes out of that openness and free choice, and it does that extremely well.Ĭombat takes a while to get used to. If one wanted to, they could join up with, say, the Polish and then rebel against them and join the Cossacks and then take all of their officials prisoner and use them as collateral to build your own nation out of what was once the Cossack nation. The player can choose to ally with any of the countries or become a freelance mercenary or become a rebel and set up their own country. The five factions, the Cossacks, the Crimeans, the Polish, the Swedish, and the Muscovites, each want to wipe out all of the others, and each have constantly shifting alliances and betrayals. (At least so it seems I’ve never read the novel.) The game is set in a vast stretch of Europe connecting several cities such as Warsaw and Moscow. A few of the missions and characters you can encounter over the course of the game indicate some inspiration from the novel the game’s based off of. The single-player campaign is as open-ended as can be there’s no real pre-written plot. I had to re-roll my character a few times at the beginning, but it was fine once I got used to how it all worked. The game throws you into the action right away, with little explanation of how the gameplay systems work, making the first few hours quite difficult for one new to the series. Does this new setting do enough to set With Fire and Sword apart from its predecessors? Or is it just Warband with guns? Read on to find out. The 1650’s were also a time of technological advancement, especially with the advent of the musket and its increased use in European warfare.
The Mount and Blade series is known for providing a realistic (to a fault) approach to medieval RPG gameplay, so now the developers have made an expansion into one of the pivotal eras of Europe, with a five-sided war between countries, fraught with constantly shifting alliances and betrayals.