I dont know why but I personally had a VERY bad first impression of Fire & Sword..
Laggy and choppy, as in framerate-skips every second in every scene (even with nothing going on in a tiny village).
Crashes when starting a new game, took me 2 tries to get my first game going.
Anti-aliasing doesnt work in some situations, such as in the inventory or party management window.
The trees look as horrible as the trees in Shogun 2, too high res leaf textures which causes them to just flicker. The trees in Warband were beautiful and smooth.
The combat also feels, odd. The armor and weapons look worse than vanilla Warband and worse than most mods.
The models on the main map, the cities look awful, like a poor alpha version of a bad mod.
And the introduction tutorial gives no mention what so ever of how to recruit troops or what the changes to the system was.
The mouse sensitivity is odd, sluggish somehow, not at all the way it feels in Warband.
The introduction tutorial is annoying, i hate the voiceover, i wish it was just like Warband instead of teaching you WASD and having you hack at a wooden barricade..
Overall it just felt like a really poor mod in the alpha stages.. Very disappointing.
In regards to my "how it looks" complaints, i have no problem with how vanilla Warband looks, in fact i consider it beautiful in many aspects. So it is not a case of me expecting zomg quality or even the standard of some mods. But when a game is released AFTER Warband, i do expect it to look EQUALLY good, not worse as in this case.
I'll have another go at it tonight, and will definetly lol at my own reply here if I have a different experience that time. But for now, disappointed.