Mount & Blade
It would be a complete disservice to discuss directional melee combat mechanics without talking about Mount & Blade. This is the series that, for all intents and purposes, pioneered the style alongside the Age of Chivalry Source mod in 2007. Mount & Blade has always been a game about large-scale conflict, sporting battles that supported up to hundreds littering the same battlefield at once. It’s pretty awesome.
The game’s single-player component tasks players with exploring a large open-world, building up an army, going on quests, and taking over whatever castle behooves you. It’s a game about freedom of choice in its purest sense, with no real story quest to propel the player in a certain direction. You make your own stories, like “the time you took on the largest army in the land in the bloodiest fight of your life” or “that time you sieged the same castle for three hours.”
But when you aren’t making political decisions or commanding armies around, Mount & Blade is a great tactical combat simulator. Attacks must be read through animations and blocked in the corresponding direction, and the same care and caution must be taken with attacks. Though, at the same time, M&B is a lot more… raw. There is no directional graphic that tells you where to expect an attack to come from and you can only survive one to two hits depending on where they land. It can be pretty frustrating, but incredibly rewarding when you get the hang of it.
Because of how quickly fights can go, you really do have to rely on your own skill, so much so that someone skilled with a sword can take on 3 or 4 enemies at once without fear. It’s a wonderful series that is getting a third sequel soon, so there has never been a better time to give the older games a try on Steam, and especially check out the equally awesome Napoleonic Wars expansion for Mount & Blade: Warband, because my 230 hours are 99 percent spent in that.
