The most innovative and revolutionary game to be created in the last decade.
You start off with a small band of men and as you progress and win battles, you level up your character and become stronger. You can recruit heroes into your party that have minds of their own where you can outfit them with different equipment. You can join a faction and war other factions in the game, taking over their castles and cities. Issue commands to your troops, and overall direct which route you want to train them. Want them to be an archer? Or a foot-soldier? You decide.
M&B gives you the most freedom that you would want in a game. Don't like how long its taking to level up your character? Export your charaters data, edit your characters attributes in notepad, save it, and then export it back into the game. Sure an easy way to cheat, but if you want to increase that "archery skill" just a little, you have that option to do so. That is the freedom that is M&B.
Actually deciding to play the game with all damage options on, etc. you will find that the game is really quite hard. Especially taking on castles and as you progress even further into the game, enemy hero units (princes, kings of other factions hero units, etc) gather more troops to their cause, which makes the battles very interesting.
In combat, you need to use strategy to defeat your foes. Each faction has different units. Khergits for example have a lot of horse archers, where as the Nords have heavy infantry foot soldiers. Use the terrain to your advantage. Draw mounted units into a ravine where theres a stream causing them to slow down their charges, where your infantry can make short work of them. Station your units inbetween trees to cover yourself from enemy archers.
Mount&Blade is revolutionary in terms of gameplay, and game developer Taleworlds is going to change the face of the gaming industry.
M&B deserves a 10+ for creating the greatest mouted combat in any game. For bring back the old school genre. For listening to and responding to questions regarding the game, and actually inputting in new ideas into the game that people have suggested on the forums.