Pitched Battle: Mount & Blade Glasgow
I'm not sure how we managed to miss this. I'm also not entirely sure that we mightn't have been better off continuing to miss this. Gangs of Glasgow is what happens if medieval warfare sim Mount & Blade was transposed to modern Glasgow, Scotland - or at least an exaggerated version of it where the extreme football hooliganism, rioting and assorted other urban violence is worse than it already is/was. On the one hand, bringing so much - from police cars to football stadiums - into a game about dudes with swords on horses is an amazing technical achievement. On the other... well, I don't know about you, but I'm making a face that tries to convey something I couldn't begin to describe accurately.
But I'll try! It's a sort of raised-eyebrowed grimace with pursed lips and wide, shocked eyes that can't look away, and the best meaning for it I can come up with is 'this is incredibly wrong but quite funny in an incredibly dark and twisted way but mostly disturbing and I don't know if I should be posting about it but it's amazing in its way but also horrible and I don't really know what to think or say about it.'
Here's a few general in-game clips:
And here's a trailer focused on recreating the notorious 1980 Old Firm pitch invasion/fight:
It could be taken as a sort of multiplayer, team-based Postal. It could also be taken as making light of a city with a dark history of football-related violence. It could also be taken as knowingly ridiculous. Or all of the three. Here's the official disclaimer:
"The mods are mostly comedic in nature, but deal with serious real-life social issues such as knife-crime, drug abuse, and sectarianism, usually in a ridiculous and/or offensive way." So, hopefully you know what you're letting yourself in for.
While the project's been around since 2009, a new, fuller build landed on ModDB earlier this week.
Thanks - sort of - for the tip, Bodminzer.