In the spirit of sharing, Mount and Blade is free on gog.com just now. Also you can get the Witcher 2 free there if you check in and get a 'stamp' every day for the next 7 days.
I vaguely remember playing a demo of one or the other and being irritated that they were charging for what seemed like it should have been a free extension to the original, but I can't remember if I liked it.
No, it's not. It's like M&B only completely shit. It was made by a third party and it shows.
The biggest problem is just the introduction of guns. They're extremely inaccurate and extremely powerful. Which may be realistic but is no fun at all. When you get hit it just feels like random chance (which it is) and you will instantly die. If you charge a line of musketeers you will die because probability dictates that at least one of them will hit you. Whereas if you get a musket you will hit maybe one in twenty shots.
Similar with grenades, if the enemy gets a lucky lob in then it can easily wipe out 20 soldiers in one hit. Which, since they're all throwing them, often happens during the initial charge meaning you and most of your army are instantly dead.
It has plenty of other problems but the main one is that. Combat is no longer fun. Stick with Warband.
Yeah, I'm still really playing Insurgency. There's not many games that really interest me enough to play them past a week or so, but Insurgency reminds me Counter-Strike. If you can find some good servers with people who'll have fun, it can be a really good laugh.