Mount & Blade Torrent is an action game developed and published by TaleWorlds Entertainment. At its core, Mount & Blade isn’t so much a structured RPG as an exploration of being stranded in a medieval world. Even though the game gets underway with a detailed character creation process loaded with a D&D level of intricacy 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.
You roll up as a hero, then head off adventuring in the realistic (meaning no magic or monsters) medieval land of Calradia. There is no story arc whatsoever, so the game begins without a strong sense of purpose to help get you immersed.
Interaction with Calradia is seriously lacking. Quests are available in towns and castles, although their number and location are spotty. Villagers only respond to a canned set of questions about local rumors and what sort of goods are produced locally. Answers are generic listings of local features, so it feels more like you’re consulting a travel guidebook for Calradia than actually speaking to a human being.
You talk to one peasant, you’ve pretty much talked to them all. Many times, too, you’ll ride over to a nearby village and discover that the locals don’t need any assistance. You can easily run into this “Thanks, but no thanks” response in three or four towns in succession, particularly at the start of the game when you’re trotting around trying to get the lay of the land. Needless to say, this doesn’t exactly stimulate your appetite to see what else this sandbox world has to offer.
What quests are on hand are generally tedious. A town elder may ask you to train a few residents so that they can better fight off bandits, or run across the land in search of a certain amount of wheat or butter. A guild merchant may want you to run a cattle drive. Castle lords and kings are also undemanding. In the early stages of the game, all they seem to require are delivery services involving running letters from one nobleman to another and collecting overdue taxes or other debts.
It’s far more intriguing to skip the scripted quests and go off on your own, as you can actually recruit a whole army of troops to raze towns and besiege castles. You can eventually sign up with a king and start a-conquering on his behalf, then go on to try to take over or destroy pretty much the entire map. Villages give you the option of seeking recruits to ride with you if you can throw down some gold denars to outfit them, which allows the accumulation of a mercenary army in short order.
Related Games:
Mount & Blade 2 Bannerlord Torrent
Mount & Blade Torrent System Requirements
- OS: Windows 2000/XP/Vista/7/8/10/11
- Memory: 512 MB of RAM
- Graphics: Graphics card with at least 64 MB memory
- Hard Drive: 700 MB
