A modest-budget rough diamond in a land of 50-million-dollar polished turds.
Mount and Blade is an old-school, extraordinarily addictive and fun, positively superior B-level title.
It is a game; it has no desire to play like a movie, so you won't spend any time watching it and compulsively marveling at cutscenes.
As such, it is a kind of shadow of what games once were; and it is therefore a reminder of what games could have become-- that is, if developers hadn't been eaten by Big Publishing.
Let's hope Taleworlds stays true to their vision and aren't dazzled into mediocrity thinking of the money they could make if they catered to a wider audience.
The graphics and sound are good. They aren't Crysis, I suppose, but they are all of a piece and well done; they won't cripple your computer, and they weren't made by so many different artists and outsourced talent that the game appears to have been made by a committee. The result is that the game looks good and is light on system requirements; moreover, one gets the sense that Mount and Blade was the labor of love of a relatively small group of craftsmen, all realizing a single vision.
The bottom line is this: If you own a PC, and you like swordplay and and horses and all that sort of thing-- whatever you do, do not miss Mount and Blade.