Mount&Blade - Review @ GameShark

GameShark serves up a review of Mount & Blade with a rating of 'A-':

At its heart, this game is an RPG, so all these choices have an affect on your starting skills. Your character has the usual set of attributes: Strength, Agility, Intelligence and Charisma. But there’s also a large set of skills that are grouped into specific classes. There are Personal Skills, like Power Strike (affects your combat damage) and Inventory Management (how much you can carry). There are Party Skills that come into play as you recruit soldiers to join you, like Tactics (affects your Battle Advantage) and Tracking (allows you to track the footprints of anything moving across the world map). And there are two Leader Skills: Prisoner Management (how many prisoners you can hold) and Leadership (how many troops you can command). Finally, there is an additional set of weapon proficiencies that determine how skilled you are with various classes of weapons.

The only real problem with this in depth beginning is that it sets the expectation that the choices you make here are going to have some affect on the game’s story. They don’t. Since this game has no set story, it’s all just a way to configure your initial character skills and starting location. If you enter the world motivated by “revenge” you’ll never find out who wronged you. You’ll never exact that revenge. It’s an implied plot point that doesn’t actually exist in the game and that’s a bit of a letdown. Fortunately, it doesn’t take long to get over it.