There isn't any guidance provided as to which place you should visit first, so you're left cruising around on a piebald nag with no particular place to go.ДЄ lot of background details are present in the game, as Calradia is divided up between four kingdoms and a Middle Eastern-style khanate (a region under the jurisdiction of a khan), and every lord and king has a listing in an encyclopedia that you can bring up on demand. Traveling across this land is easily accomplished on a tactical map of sorts, where you click on the location you want to visit to gallop off toward it. When the game starts you're plopped down on the back of a horse in the middle of a vast medieval realm dotted by towns, castles, and the odd river and mountain range. Removing any sort of story hook from Mount & Blade makes it only appropriate for the hardcore role-playing gamer who plays RPGs just to explore a fantasy land, not to accomplish anything or become an epic-level druid or whatever.

There is, but you have to do a great deal of wandering around to find it. This isn't to say that there isn't anything to do in Calradia. There is no story arc whatsoever, so the game begins without a strong sense of purpose to help get you immersed. You roll up as a hero, then head off adventuring in the realistic (meaning no magic or monsters) medieval land of Calradia. Even though the game gets underway with a detailed character creation process loaded with a D&D level of rigmarole regarding the stats, skills, and personality-establishing questions about your childhood last heard from your shrink, there is no shape to the game beyond that. There is something positive to be said for wide-open RPGs that leave the storytelling up to you, but this game is so incomplete that it'll feel as if you're being asked to script a heroic saga without the benefit of pen and paper.ДЄ strong battle engine isn't enough to offset all of the problems with Mount & Blade's fit, finish, and near-total lack of RPG structure.ДЄt its center, Mount & Blade isnвЂ™t so much a structured RPG as an exploration of being stranded in a medieval world. Unfortunately, this derring-do is only one part of a cheaply stitched-together, single-player-only role-playing game that replaces plot with a sandbox world that leaves you without a clue of what to do or where to go. TaleWorlds Entertainment has come up with one of the most innovative and user-friendly re-creations of combat ever seen in a first/third-person RPG, with exciting battles on foot, mounted on horseback, and at the head of a private army. If all you had to do was fight, Mount & Blade might have been a winner.

Mount and blade cattle follow