A lot of people on the Polish side were commanding the fast-moving ‘Winged Hussars’ (or ‘those fucking Winged Hussars’ as I came to know them). After improving my arsenal (who wants to go into battle with something called ‘worthless bullets’ eh?) I didn’t have too much cash left for this, but after some financial juggling was able to bump up my marksmen from hopeless peons to semi-trained peons.Ĭhoosing un-mounted, musket-armed troops proved, almost immediately, to be a mistake. In Captain mode this extends to the quality of your troops too. In WFaS’s multiplayer, you’re supplied with a certain amount of gold (decided by the host) to spend on upgrades like better guns, sillier hats and horses that can actually move their legs a bit. Upon joining the server, it seemed the Russians were already some 100 points down on the Poles (with the first to 300 kills being the victor), so I opted to aid the ailing Tsar and lead some musket-wielding marksmen into the fray. With poor captaincy, It’s not unusual for these matches to turn into a frightening, multi-legged amorphous blob of infantry, horse and musketeer all vying for a clean melee hit. The great strength of this mode is it makes matters even more frenetic than usual, because you’re trying to effectively command your troops while keeping an eye on your own back. In it, you’re given a small squad of bots to point at the other team and have to tot up a collective number of kills before the other side does the same. It may sound more like a superhero equipped with a deadly tinderbox, but Captain Deathmatch is actually the new Mount & Blade (M&B) multiplayer mode exclusive to WFaS.

Throw upwards of twenty people into a relatively small map space, give most of them horses and the rest guns, then ask them to do what comes naturally in a videogame. But the title did succeed in rekindling our interest for Mount & Blade’s superbly chaotic multiplayer. If you’ve read our review of Mount & Blade: With Fire & Sword (WFaS) you’ll already know that we found the single player side of things a little underwhelming compared to the superior (and older) Mount & Blade: Warband.

Mount and blade warband winged hussars