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'Mount & Blade' for Android shows that full PC games can go mobile

'Mount & Blade' for Android shows that full PC games can go mobile

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The mobile gaming landscape already boasts loads of brilliant touchscreen experiences, but "big" games are few and far between. There's a number of excellent console ports like Bastion, Limbo, The Walking Dead and XCOM: Enemy Unknown, but we're hard pressed to think of a developer other than Rockstar, with its ports of old PS2 Grand Theft Auto titles, to fit truly giant games into the mobile realm. There are signs which indicate that will soon change, though, and today Taleworlds Entertainment is getting a head start, porting its full PC game Mount & Blade: Warband to Android devices with Nvidia's Tegra 4 processor.

Unfortunately, that restricts the $6.99 (normally $9.99) title to gamers who own Nvidia's Shield gaming handheld and a small number of Android tablets like the HP Slate 7 Extreme, but those who can play should get a rather full game, with an open world ripe for conquest by sword, bow, spear, and lance, plus 64-player online multiplayer matches, and full character customization. It's an actual port of a PC title rather than a miniaturized remake. Mount & Blade hasn't been a particularly graphically impressive series of games even on PC, and it's not exactly filled with eye candy here, but it looked surprisingly fun in our brief test. More importantly, it's a milestone on the way to traditional game developers taking mobile platforms seriously. Take a peek at the trailer below.