Merek's Market vs Mount & Blade
Merek's Market
Merek's Market is a whimsical shop simulation game with time management elements, putting you into the running shoes of a shopkeeper in a medieval fantasy period where adventurers are aplenty. Craft and sell a huge variety of useful items, be it armor, weapons, potions, or even… pottery, serve your customers as quickly as possible, and try to upsell your items whenever they decide to haggle!As you play, the levels get increasingly more difficult, making that shiny gold rating a real achievement to get. The game also comes with a host of twists to its gameplay, spicing up the typical time management levels with mini-games and funny dialogues.
If you’re a fan of time management games, Merek’s Market offers the kind of gameplay you seek with a couple of nice twists, slathered with enough tongue-in-cheek humor to make you bark out a laugh once or twice on every level. Although I’ve not tried the game’s co-op, its single-player mode is already very entertaining to play, and challenging too, if you’re aiming for that shiny gold rating. Highly recommended!
Mount & Blade
Mount & Blade is the first game in a highly popular game franchise that boasts of being an RPG with one of the most sandbox-like gameplay ever. In this game, you can play as anyone you like be it a lone adventurer, a military commander or even the "mayor" of a small town in Calradia. The game also provides a rich and open world, allowing you to travel anywhere you like and discover all manner of points of interest ranging from farm villages to massive castles. You even have the freedom to interact with hundreds of characters, some of which will likely be hostile towards you. Due to this, the game provides you with an intuitive combat system that includes both sword-fighting and fighting on horseback that you can use to dispose of the hostile.Mount & Blade is an old game, and as such, its graphics may be a bit dated and its controls feel rather clunky. Thus, the game by itself might not be worth the money, but if you can get it along with Mount & Blade Warband or Mount & Blade With Fire and Sword - the two other and much better games in the series, then it'll be worth getting it.