Mount & Blade: Warband - Napoleonic Wars DLC

Something I did not know when I started playing this is that Napoleonic Wars is multiplayer only. Oh well! It's still pretty fun, so, I'm not too mad. It's hard to describe the gameplay but basically, this DLC, or expansion, or whatever you want to call it, basically feels exactly like a Sourcemod made for HL2 in 2007. It has the exact feel of being like a no budget uni-student project, thrown together by a bunch of friends who only kind of know what they are doing. Oh, and I guess that must be the exact story basically, since after a little research this DLC was primarily developed by 'Flying Squirrel Entertainment' - not TaleWorlds. I am going to guess then that this team put this, Napoleonic Wars, together, but they had to credit TaleWorlds for their engine. This really has the strong feel of being a mod, everything is janky as hell, but the game has tons of character and it's full of strange pointless items that are really just for fun. Which is great, honestly, but that should set the tone for what this game is. I wouldn't expect a lot if you choose to pick this up, in other words. The multiplayer experience from what I played, was also pretty much exactly the 2007 Source Engine experience. Any game, like HL2DM, CS:S, TF2, ZPS, whatever, has the exact kind of dedicated server setup, and the exact same kind of player experience, where you meet weird people with weird names and most of the server is goofing around except for a couple people tryharding for some reason, but everyone is there just to have fun basically. There's a few different classes, it seems like there's cavalry classes, several infantry classes, some specialist classes like a medic, engineer, that kind of thing, and you can also play as leaders too, like Napoleon himself. The weapons aren't quite as specific as the regiments seem to be for each class, so it's a lot of 'Infantry Musket' or 'Rifle'. But that's okay. The game seems to have a very off-beat sense of humour to it, which shouldn't be ignored. The tutorial, which is worth playing since it's short and explains everything you need to play the game very briskly, has a rather absurd British voice, or someone doing a British voice, explaining everything. I mentioned you can bring instruments onto the field, such as bagpipes, a fife, drums, and so on - they put like clearly a lot of effort into this. You can even select particular songs, AND there's a 'play together' system so I guess you can sync up and play music with other players. If you dig into the admin tools menu as well, admins are allowed to spawn a variety of incredibly dangerous, overpowered weapons such as a holy hand grenade, a 'cannonball gun' and a literal banhammer - which I can only assume literally bans anyone you hit with it. I am getting to this game pretty late, 2025, so I could only find a single server with like 40 people, so the population is pretty low at the moment. It's a shame too since I heard about this game like 10 years ago and just never played it up until now, I probably would have loved it a lot more back then. As for right now, while I love the nostalgic fumes of what this game is, it's probably not something I'm going to return to over and over. It is pretty great, though.

Many fond memories on this way back when.... Defending one of the farms at Waterloo was one of the best things ever haha. Some of the first organised events and clans, Civil War, Pike & Shot, Revolutionary War and of course this. My favorite with the buds was Persistent World Frontier, we role played Cherokee and smoked/scalped any settlers heading west.. in the map. Even without voice chat then, we could tell they were proper traumatized as they jumped or immediately turned 180 to head back the other way, eventually they sent an army after us, but by then we had taken too much loot. Would love to see a mod like that on resurface on Bannerlord one-day, with voice chat.