Mount and Blade: Warband

Mount & Blade: Warband is one of my favorite games. It's a sandbox strategy game where you take on the role as a hero in a fictional land called Caladria. It's not the best looking game and I'd like to quote Gamespot and their review of the game. "Mount and Blade: Warband would be that girl with a hormone disorder that made her have kind of a beard. But like beard-girl, Warband has a really good personality and if you close your eyes when you kiss you can pretend that the facial hair is just a scarf or something."  This is really true and they make a great point. It's not a good looking game but it is one of the most fun games I've played in recent years. It's personality is great, you just go on playing for hours and hours on end. 

The game itself is built up around your ability to do anything you like and not having a fixed set of quests to follow, if you'd like to follow King Ragnar for a while that's alright and if you later decide to revolt, capture, put him in a dungeon and join his worst enemy that's also ok. Sure you loose your friendship with his faction but that's ok since you just want to pillage and kill everyone who's a nord anyways. The combat system could be improved, (which it is in some mods, ill go on talking about mods later), since 200 guys just running towards each other isn't really a good strategy in a battle. The damage system itself is quite complex and a lot of factors decide how much damage you do, if you're on horseback thrusting your sword or lance towards the enemy you'll make more damage then if you are on foot. The four different swinging directions of your weapon also makes a difference since thrusting your sword doesn't deal as much damage as swinging it from above your head. There are a lot of more mechanics and factors which decide how much damage you do and this makes the game have quite a steep learning curve that must be overcome before the real fun begins. 

It is how ever quite fun watching 100 of your men run towards the enemy throwing their spears just before the two army's clash. 

Mods

There are a lot of mod for M&B out there but the ones I've fund most fun are 1257 AD and Brytenwalda.
Most of these mods adds things to the game that really should have been in the original version, like the ability to join a lords army and sending messages to your vassals telling them to join you in campaigns.

1257 AD takes place in the year 1257 (orly?) in Europe, the map is huge it has Europe, west Russia, parts of the middle east and north Africa. With so many factions to choose from the games can run for quite long before you decide you've defeated everyone worth defeating and choose to start a new game. 

Brytenwalda adds pretty much the same things as 1257 AD but it does so on the British isles during the early middle ages. The factions are pretty much historically correct and there are lots to choose from. 

Overall Mount and Blade is a really fun game which is very worth it's price. The game is fun to play and will give hundreds of hours of fun, since you can choose to do things different every time.