You can take this as my review for Mount and Blade Warband, plus the Viking Reforged and Napolenic Wars DLC.

Why am I doing it here? Well GOG's existing review system STINKS OF RANCID SHIT. The 1500 character limit is often not enough to really explain the many reasons of why some games are good or bad. You cannot change even your own reviews later, not even to correct typoes! Reviews often mysterious disappear, especially if the developers "don't like it", but saying that, I've had good reviews vanish for no reason - and with no-one at GOG contacting me as to why. Then there is the extreme toxic repping culture that poisons all GOG review pages. That usually manifests as all "bad" one and two star reviews, heck, even "fair" three stars being negrepped to shit even if they are informative, truthful and articulate, but "good" four and especially five star reviews that are utter SHIT, utter lies and fanboi ravings, or just say shit like "iz gud gam" or "tankuGOG" or "GOG is so wonderful" get nothing but pure positive reps. Said toxic 5-star worshipping fanbois also use the "report" button as a means of censorship a little too much as well. Repping is also the only pathetic way to respond to a review, there is no facility for adding comments like there is on Steam. Despite calling on GOG for years to change things on their reviews, they've done fuck all. Not even farting in response.

And well, you see, "Mount and Blade Warband" and both it's DLCs are going to fget a flaming takedown from me.
Ok, I'll try not to rant too much, but here we go:-

ONE STAR? F-OFF! ZERO STARS!

I got the original "Mount and Blade" years ago, must have been way back in '14 or '15, for FREE! I enjoyed that, though did get bogged down with not being able to progress any further than having a company sized army of about 80, and I left it alone for awhile - in fact I didn't ever go back. But when I saw "Mount and Blade Warband" and the DLCs I thought, great I'll try those! And bought them - good job they were on sale.
I persevered for a week and then had to just grab them and stuff them down the shitter, in rage...... I was having NO fun, not a drop. Just frustration, frustration, frustration, frustration. I did get to the "80 man army" stages again, but found it impossible to keep their wages funded.
- making money is possible, but the grind, grind, grind, grind, GRIND required to get up to any kind of wealth needed to maintain a 100+ army even temporarily is just simply prohibitive. All sources of income are truly pathetic whilst even a bean costs 10000 coin! It would take weeks, if not months. And NVM 100+, you need 500+ in this game. So basically, you are going to spend a YEAR of your life REAL life NOT in game time earning enough just to have this army for a few days before going broke again and back to square one.
- nothing presents you with any real kind of significant reward of any nature, even the greatest of deeds! Yet the tiniest mistakes have world shattering consequences. This is even on the easiest difficulty settings that claim to enhance positive effects and mitigate negative ones.
- not a turd in the game helps you, 99% of dialogs end in simply "GFY".
- NPCs are just....... LOOOOOL...... example, that "troll" at "Trolls Bridge" in Danmark. Even on easiest combat settings, which at first look like god mode cheats, you'll be thrashed even by a chicken in one to one combat.
- quests are broken, and simply fuck the game over after all your effort, example the "Morrigan" quest.
- controls are sluggish and just feel bad, no matter how you configure them.
- even the tiniest little jobs usually require days (REAL TIME, not in game time) of just boring tedious yomping across the map and require enormous efforts of tedium from the player, to be rewarded with 10 fucking coins. Or even just a "thank you now kiss my arse"!
- the village and town scenes are little better, having to search for "Adda" or the town physician anyone? (Those are Viking Reforged DLC specific issues - I'll get to that DLC later). I'm sure you know how BORING it gets searching and searching and searching and searching and yomping and yomping and yomping and yomping 99.99999% of the time, that really is the game, search and yomp and rip your hair out, rinse wash repeat again and again and again and again, and well, you get the picture eh?
- progress is non-existant in ALL aspects, I have never seen a game where character level ups do so little!
- how the holy scrotums you get to actually be a lord or jarl or king or vassal or even become their grooms of the stool, well that's beyond all my ken.

Except slow progress, insufficient funds and not knowing how to become a lord, I had better memories of the original "Mount and Blade". This later "Warband" has NOTHING the original does not, except all the above frustration and piss taking difficulty - as well as a whole host of bugs and general jank in every line of code....... it's a seriously LQ product!

Do the DLCs improve things?

Do they f***.

The Viking Reforged DLC changes everything, except what needed to be, and makes the repetive grind and extreme difficulty even WORSE. Now those long boring journeys you'll spend your entire existence in the game upon now cost you thousands because you need to hire ships! Buy your own, well a spare million or two might just get you enough ships of your own to get a few men and a duck across the water. Enjoy trading wool from Dorestad to Dunwich 100000x over the next 50 years to earn enough gold for your own ships!
Ships are just too slow, too low capacity and too expensive. Even changing the paint jobs can cost 20000!
The completely new feature adds nothing to the game except MORE frustration and hate.
ZERO STARS!

How about the Napoleonic DLC? It's just online multiplayer ONLY. That's it. And it's shit. ZERO STARS!

So if you already have the original "Mount and Blade", maybe you also got it free when I did years ago, DO NOT be tempted to spend so much as a tepid whiff from your backside on any of the later in the series.

Hello Falran, and Clownski!

EDIT (see? You can't do that on the usual GOG review pages :D)
I hear that the game is easily moddable, directly by changing ingame files with just "notepad"? Well, I've uninstalled for now (give me some cool down time) but may look at that in future.
And some rumours that Mount and Blade Warband is just a "paid for expansion" for the original? Well that says a lot if true.
And "Viking Reforged DLC" was once a FREE 3rd party mod that TaleWorlds just usurped (been playing their own game too much) and starting selling. Claiming they'd fixed all the bugs, but seemingly that's just bullshit.

Both the original Mount & Blade and Warband are 500h+ games for a single play-through. The game is quite grindy.
For a long time in the beginning you should keep your number of troupes LOW in order to save money while you get levels and gear.
You will earn more later in the game but you will need better levels and gear. I earn a lot at the tournaments. Hopefully you understood how trading works and that it changes over time.
I personally went back to the original game, after trying out Warband for a bit, as I prefer the simpler game.
Sluggish? Sounds like you need a faster weapon and higher levels.
Quests pay badly? Yes, the real reward is not the money.

Do you need to love the game? Certainly not.
Hopefully the next thing you play will be more to your liking.

If it's as easy to mod, without needed specific utilities or anything, as I have seen said in some reviews and this forum, then I may likely come back to give it a second try, I may be able to edit out the worst of the features I found dislikable. It was a disappointment after (this may sound odd) liking the first original "Mount and Blade" when I played it in 2017. Also I was in a much better place psychologically then. Warband added nothing I could see except more grind, higher difficulty, tedium in spades and jank. Viking Reforged DLC added even more of that, and the Napoleonic Wars DLC was not what I expected being mostly online PvP only. Yes, I foolishly neglected read the store page before buying!

So, maybe I'll give it a second go, or stick to the first "M&B" - especially if that too is easily modded to ease the grind.

Since you miss having a comment feature for reviews - which in my own personal experience of leaving a steam review for a game that DID NOT/DOES NOT RUN and then having a couple dozen numbskulls try to give me the internet verbal beatdown with their broken english doesn't seem that useful a feature, here we go. I think you're misrepresenting Warband despite having some good points about the review system.

First of all, you're complaining about Warband by name but only talking about Viking Conquest(RE) features, which is going to misinform and confuse people, including me at first. You also bought the multiplayer only Napoleonic DLC, I almost did until I saw it was only multiplayer(if you want Mount and Blade with guns try With Fire and Sword based off the Polish novels which are a good read). If you didn't realize that it was only multiplayer: that sucks bud most of us have been in a similar spot; but it's also unfortunately your fault not reading the store page; and GOG has a 30 day refund window.

Warband being a paid expansion? Yes, it is customary to pay for expansions. Maybe I'm misunderstanding your terminology. Viking Reforged as far as I understand it came from the Brytenwalda total conversion modpack being considered kickass enough that Talewords approached them to develop it into an actual DLC(thus forming brytenwaldastudios.com). Yes, like many total conversion mods it is harder than Warband, because it also like most mods, is made by people who have beaten Warband enough times to want more challenge and options.

If you don't understand how a game works, that doesn't make it a bad game. It you can't manage the base game then of course harder expansions are going to be even rougher on you. I am too tired to go into a point by point clarification for Viking Conquest(RE) but I will mention the only bugs I recall were base game engine issue things like memorey leak and cow images in the water.

If you have 80 knights/mamelukes in M&B/Warband you should be winning all reasonable and most of the unreasonable fights you get into. Do you not have a companion trained as a medic, or any companions at all? Never win tournaments for money or own enterprises maybe? Maybe you should just try starting as a king in VC(RE) and faffing about for a while mate. I'd be happy to give anybody game tips since the games have given me tons of fun once I learned the mechanics of the world. You could edit your character text file or import a character to ease the grind for instance.

Please don't take this response as an attack. You have an entertaining writing style and I think I'd enjoy reading you reviewing calculus or something else annoying.

... and that's as far as I got. I was tolerating the toxicity, but when you started toxically calling others toxic, I had my fill.

.... and the anal retentive parade never ends.

Since reading this thread, I did stumble across your "review". I wasn't even looking for it. In fact, I forgot you existed. It was just there near the end of the page when it caught my eye, and I remembered this thread. It made no comments explaining the score, just linked to a forum thread (presumably this one), and also just more toxicity towards the "toxic fanbois", and a plea for people to distrust anyone with a differing opinion.

I had assumed that you had posted a review on the page first, then made this page once it had been down-voted and/or reported. But no, on reading again, I realise that this forum post was made first, and your alleged experiences were with other games on this site. You made this awful, toxic, ad-hominem strewn post *in anticipation* of backlash!

My point is this: you seem to have a history of being down-voted and reported, but at the same time, crave respect and validation from other users. Have you considered how much of this disrespect comes from your own behaviour, rather than the behaviour of others around you? Have you considered that it's not so much the dissenting opinion as the way it's portrayed?

There are a number of reasons why your review is not particularly helpful:

1. It's difficult to read with so much toxic hate flowing through it. I got part of the way through a paragraph before I had to stop.
2. Hiding actual criticism behind a link is an annoying extra step. Most people are not going to read a review behind a link anyway.
3. Speaking in absolutes like "0% fun or satisfaction" or "ONE STAR!? F- OFF! ZERO STARS!", or just attempting to invalidate anyone who sees anything redeeming in the game, speaks of bias and an axe to grind. Why trust the crazy guy ranting in the corner, when plenty of reasonable-sounding people who disagree with him? You know, people capable of seeing both the good and the bad in things and seem capable of recognising that rational people may disagree with them. Acting like a game, which has a generally positive reception, is actually a mould-breakingly bad game whose terribleness the GoG review platform is fundamentally ill-equipped to represent, just makes everything you say sound dubious, and thus, unhelpful.
4. Using the review of the game to rant about fans of the game, or GoG's review system, even if you have a reasonable point somewhere buried in there, is just wasting your audience's time. They want to know what the game is like. They don't want to hear you whining.

I'm not going to reply again. I'm not going to report you. I've been as constructive as I can with my criticism of your criticism.

Good, don't relpy again. You think you're so clever with your "smug, sophist" internet master "debater" long winded dysentries. Believe me, you are not even in the top 50% of that bunch. But like the rest of them, you are a complete and utter liar, so far up your own rectum your head could recursively go back up there a second time. Are you a member of the Australian Atheists by any chance? You're debating style seems quite similar to theirs!

I have NOT got a history of being downvoted, and as rep stats are no longer shown there is NO way you could know. All you have done is arrogantly assumed it - and becuase YOU assumed it, it MUST be fact!
I'll grant you my reviews get an average of 4 downvotes to 1 upvote, but that is simply because I am not in a clique, who all upvote each other. Most my reviews, like most reviews from NON-CLIQUE members, get downvoted. This is regardless of content or whether it's a positive or negative review. Most GOG review "voters" are raving 5-star only maniacs who downvote ANY review that isn't a 5-star job, or they just do it out of spite. The sheer number of these downvotes shows just how many such saddoes there are. I trust I got my share of yours?
Same with your claim I have a history of being reported. I have never been reported actaully! Go figure! You're wrong again! I'd have wagered you may been my first. But wait! There is NO report button anymore! So you couldn't even if you wished to. I was tempted to report you as well - even if just for the misleading statements.
Again, there is NO way you could know anything about of any such things, as such issues are between GOG staff and myself.

Goodbye. And riddance.

Ghee, guy, calm down a bit. You are not in a swearing and insult contest but in a game forum.
I think you owe every random reader here an excuse.

Jesus! People *still* whining about this after a year?

I owe "every random reader" (what?) here an "excuse" (what? again....). Do you mean "apology"? Christ, you can't even use the right words!!!!!

Dude you should be reported for posts that have nothing but an insult, and you should be criticized for factually inaccurate posts, at the very least, if not also for completely pointless/useless ones. I would report you if I could find a button for it. If all that you have and are is just anger to spew out, and suicide is illegal in your country, perhaps consider joining the military.

Maybe someday you will be healthy enough to not attack other people for your own mistakes and hatred of your life. I hope you make it to there.(or at least lose your internet connection so that the rest of the world gets a little bit better)

Well, you need some fights for gold and experience. Actually, city production is enough to forget about money. Also training skill will do for xperience gains.
See my guide for passing the game:
www.gamestales.com/2023/02/mount-and-blade-warband.html