$9.99Mount & Blade: With Fire & Sword Musket volleys in an open Europe
Mount & Blade goes to the 17th century and hands everyone a musket. Fight for Sweden, the Cossacks, Muscovy, Poland or the Crimean Khanate in an open sandbox Eastern Europe, build and outfit your own army, and follow storylines drawn from a Nobel-prize novel. The old combat system is back, now with gunpowder.
Is Mount & Blade: With Fire & Sword worth it?
Mount & Blade: With Fire & Sword is worth it if…
- you want to command pike-and-shot armies against horse archers and Winged Hussars in a setting other games ignore
- you like a hard sandbox where money is scarce and a stray bullet can end a battle in a second
- you enjoy following a faction's storyline and intrigue, with several endings to chase
- you want to build and equip your own army soldier by soldier, then ride into the melee yourself
Screenshots
Gunpowder on the battlefield
The proven Mount & Blade combat system gains a new century. Muskets and pistols join the battlefield, and they change the rhythm of every fight: a single well-aimed shot can drop a rider at a hundred paces, but reloading is slow and early guns are clumsy and inaccurate. You can even carry a pistol as a sidearm in hand-to-hand combat and shoot a foe at arm's length before the sabre work starts. Grenades, massed volleys and new siege options before you assault a town add real tactical weight. Running a sword line into musket fire is a lesson this game teaches the hard way, and it sticks.
Five factions, one war-torn corner of Europe
The setting is 17th century Eastern Europe, researched in depth and rarely touched by other games: the Polish Commonwealth, the Cossack Hetmanate, Muscovy, the Kingdom of Sweden and the Crimean Khanate, each with its own troops, armour and style of war. In the open sandbox you pick your allies and enemies, choose which provinces to conquer, which castles to siege and which quests to take. Fully customizable armies let you outfit every soldier piece by piece. Once you have made a name with a faction, three main story-driven questlines open up, full of political intrigue, and the story has multiple endings, so each playthrough can land somewhere different.
What should you know before starting?
Can you play it solo?
Yes, the singleplayer sandbox is the heart of the game: you build an army, trade, take quests and conquer territory on your own. There is also multiplayer with new maps and a Captain team deathmatch mode, though the multiplayer scene has quieted down over the years, so treat it as a bonus rather than the main draw.
How hard is it?
Harder than Warband, and it does not apologise for it. Money is scarce early on, some factions are brutal opponents, and a musket ball does not care how long you spent levelling. The upside is that once you learn the rhythms, from keeping cavalry out of firing lines to timing a volley, the fights feel genuinely tactical.
How faithful is it to the novel?
The storyline is based on "With Fire and Sword", the cult novel by Nobel-prize winner Henryk Sienkiewicz, and the historical research runs through the whole game, from the factions and cities to the weapons and armour. The three main questlines per faction lean into that setting with intrigue, rebellions and shifting loyalties rather than pure conquest.
