Bannerlord came out about a week ago in Early Access, and I’ve logged quite a few hours into it already. So today, I’ll be weighing in with my impressions, taking into account the good, the bad, and the buggy, of Mount & Blade 2: Bannerlord. Though I have played the previous installments to the series, I will be reviewing Bannerlord entirely as a stand-alone feature, to prevent any nostalgic biases from slipping through. 

About Bannerlord

Bannerlord is a sandbox medieval RPG that walks the line between RTS, RPG, and kingdom management sim. In it you take your character through any number of adventures in the continent of Calradia. Raise armies and build an empire? Pledge yourself to a king or queen and be their loyal vassal? Make your fortune as a merchant bringing goods from city to city; there really is no major structure that pushes you towards one way of playing. 

From publisher TaleWorlds Entertainment, who also published the previous installments in the series, fans of the series have been eagerly waiting for Bannerlord’s release since it was first announced way back in September 2012. Though it is currently only in Early Access, the game has been met with incredible success, having the largest launch of the year up to that point, with more than 170,000 players at once

Bannerlord: The Story

It’s funny this was released in March, because that’s like 50% of what you do in the game

Bannerlord takes place two centuries before the previous game. The setting is Calardia, a medieval continent filled with distinct peoples all fighting for a bigger piece of the map. Your character starts out as a resident of a small town that has been viciously attacked by bandits, leaving you with no home and nothing but what you are carrying with you. You quickly find yourself wrapped up in a quest to assemble an ancient banner that will either lend more legitimacy to any one of the rulers you choose to pledge your allegiance to, or legitimize your own quest to start your own kingdom and conquer Calradia for your own. 

Due to the format of the M&B games, the story is largely what you make of it. It’s more of a medieval life sim than anything else. Will you conquer the realm? Have children and set up a legacy? Will you travel from town to town fighting in tournaments for fame and fortune? Perhaps you would prefer the life of a bandit, and will become a feared plague upon the ruling clans of Calradia? This is one of the few games where you can truly say that your destiny is entirely in your own hands. 

Bannerlord: Gameplay

 

Bannerlord Gameplay Footage

The first thing you will interact with when starting a new game of Bannerlord, is its character creator. It’s not the most impressive character creator I’ve had the chance to play around with, giving you little to nothing customizable with the body besides a height slider, however it does offer a reasonable amount of options for customizing your character’s face and hair. You will choose either a male or female character, which has only a minor impact on the actual game at the moment, (though it’s worth noting that this is still in early access and this is all subject to improvement over the coming months) and you will choose a racial background which will provide you with some racial bonuses depending on which you choose. 

Now, having created a character you will be free to start the actual game. Gameplay in Bannerlord can be broken into two sections, the overworld which is where you will traverse the map with your soldiers, and manage your kingdom and fiefs. Bannerlord manages to cram a lot of things you can do and control from this screen, especially in terms of kingdom management (which becomes especially important if you opt to start your own kingdom instead of joining one of the preexisting ones.) The map itself is massive, taking a fair amount of time to traverse even if you are using the faster time option (which is a must on long journeys if you are as impatient as I am). It’s not just open space though, it is filled with villages, castles, cities, and bandit camps. Then, of course, there are your fellow people of Calradia, you will seldom travel more than a few seconds without seeing someone, whether it’s a lord riding along with their army, some villagers bringing goods to market, a trade caravan, a mercenary patrolling an area or a group of bandits looking for people to rob before returning to their hideout. Right now, the map is very busy and I’ve little doubt that there will be more to be added as the months roll on.  

Then there are battles, which take place from the first or third perspective of your character. In battles you will have the ability to direct your soldiers around the battlefield with a series of reasonably well-implemented commands. You will also be controlling your character in the battle, fighting your way through enemy soldiers either on foot or from horseback.  Attacking and blocking are both direction based, so unless you are using a shield you will only be able to block attacks if you block in the correct direction of the attack. The same is true of your enemies so mixing up your attacks is key. Shields can block all attacks you are facing, but each shield has a max amount of damage it can take before breaking. You don’t lose the shield, it will be fine for your next battle but for the remainder of the battle you will have to do without it so it’s good to get a handle on blocking without one early on. 

As for what there is to do in Bannerlord, right now there’s a fair amount of options. You can take on the role of a merchant, buying goods in one town and selling them for more in another town. You can sell your services to the notable citizens of towns and cities, doing a variety of short missions for them to make money and get supplies. You can travel from town to town, fighting in tournaments for renown and gold, or you can travel the countryside hunting down bandit hideouts for battle practice and gold. Eventually, you will probably want to either pledge yourself to one of the factions or try to take a castle and start your own kingdom (usually not a good idea to do until you’re really confident in your skills and your soldiers because once you do this you will paint a massive target on your head.) At the time of writing this, there’s only a small handful of quests that lords and notable citizens will give you so you will see a lot of repeating in that regard, but Taleworlds has said that they have a high priority on adding more quests and the like soon. 

It’s not just soldiers you can recruit to your party though, there’s a huge list of companions to choose from that you will meet in Taverns across the continent. For the most part at the moment they aren’t very unique, you will hear a lot of the same backstories, and a lot of them have almost identical stats, but that’s also something Taleworlds has listed as something they are working on improving soon. Companions are useful though because unlike soldiers they have access to the same skills and skill perks as the main character, allowing you to focus on building your character to have the skills you want them to have and letting your companions take over on the skills you don’t want to focus on (I, for example, would say having a medic companion is pretty much a requirement if you want to be successful). You can also send them on missions that you don’t want to do, or make them the governor of a settlement if you don’t want to manage it yourself. 

Ultimately the fluid and open gameplay of Bannerlord ensures a great deal of replayability. I know I’ll be making a few more characters at the very least before I take any kind of solid break from it. 

Bannerlord: Combat

Bannerlord Combat

Combat in Bannerlord will feel familiar to anyone that has played the previous games in the series. There’s nothing groundbreaking here, but the formula is solid and it works. If you’ve played other medieval combat sims like For Honour, or Kingdom Come, you will get the idea fairly quickly. Basically, all attacks are launched from one of four directions, left and right are sideways slashes, up is a downward chop, and down brings your weapon back to be used in a thrusting motion. There’s a strategy here though, beyond just trying to score a hit on the enemy. Certain weapons do more damage slashing than thrusting or vise versa (a battleaxe is going to be mostly useless when being thrust at an enemy, but a lance is going to suffer from a similar problem if you were to swing it) Then there is speed and momentum to consider, a thrust attack without any speed behind it will be lackluster, but if you thrust a spear at an opponent charging towards you on a horse? Well, then the damage frequently goes from 10’s and 20’s up into the hundreds. Downward chopping attacks of course are especially dangerous because if the opponent isn’t blocking they take a hit directly to their head which can sometimes end a fight right there if they don’t have decent head protection. 

There are six categories of weapons to choose from in Bannerlord. First, you have the melee weapons which are broken into: Single-handed (Your smaller swords, axes, maces, etc), Two-Handed (battleaxes, greatswords, etc), and Polearms (spears, lances, etc). Then you have your ranged weapons which are broken into Bows, Crossbows, and thrown weapons (Javelinas, Throwing Axes, etc). Each of these weapon categories comes with its own skill tree and list of available perks as you level said skill tree, so if you really like one type of weapon it really pays to practice with it as much as possible. You can only equip four weapons at a time, which doesn’t sound restricting until you realize that arrows and shields both count as a weapon on their own, so you are going to have to find the loadout that suits your strengths. My favorite combo so far is to have a decent spear, a sword and shield, and some javelins, but I almost exclusively fight from horseback and if I were going to fight on foot I’d likely switch out the spear and javelins for a bow and arrows. 

Bannerlord is an RPG at its heart, and as such wouldn’t be complete without a leveling system and skill trees. Bannerlord’s approach to skill trees is interesting, if a little simple for my taste. There are 18 skills to master in Bannerlord, with each skill having an unlockable perk every 25 levels. Your skills will level organically as you use them, and you will gradually unlock points that can be applied to a skill tree you want to improve. These points raise the skill cap on that skill tree, allowing you to further increase the skill and unlock more perks. Some perks are fairly straight forward and what you’d expect, for example, the first perk you unlock for archery is the Marksman perk that increases your accuracy with bows by 10%, and then there are some that are a little more of a surprise like the Standard Bearer perk in the polearm skill tree, which boosts the morale of your troops when you are in a battle at their side. 

Bannerlord also has a PVP multiplayer mode. It uses a class system that allows you to choose from 7 customizable classes of warrior from each of the major in-game factions. You will then have the option (currently) of choosing from Team Deathmatch, Skirmish (a team-based mode where teams fight to hold control points), Captain Mode (a team game where you each control some NPC Troops and work together to destroy the other team’s forces), and Siege (One team attacks a castle, the other defends.) The multiplayer is fun and fast-paced, though somewhat limited at the moment. I would like to see a solid unlockables system for leveling through PVP.

Bannerlord: Quests and Missions

Although Bannerlord is fairly free form in terms of pushing you to achieve any specific goal, there is a quest system there. Each town and city will have a collection of “notable people” that will sometimes be able to give you quests. You will usually find at least one person in each town offering a quest, though often there are a few of them. Completing these quests will reward you with gold, and will also raise your reputation with the person that gave you the quest. This is important because it’s these people that control your ability to recruit soldiers from their settlement. If all the notable people in a town or city hate you, you won’t be able to recruit any soldiers at all from that settlement. However if they all love you, not only will you be able to recruit a lot more people from those settlements, but you will be able to recruit higher level soldiers as well. Cities also have lords that can often be found in the Lord’s Hall, that will offer you missions in the same way. Gaining reputation with the nobles doesn’t affect your recruiting soldiers, but it does allow you to slowly build alliances that will help you when you are trying to improve the standing of your clan. A noble that likes you is more likely to marry you/let you marry into their clan, and are more likely to betray their current kingdom in favor of a kingdom you’ve created. They are also more likely to support you for getting fiefs, when it’s voted on in a kingdom. 

At present there are only a handful of available quests. For example, there is a quest where a noble asks you to take a group of mercenaries off their hands and try and convince another noble to buy their contract. I have done this quest at least thirty times in my week of playing. More quests are going to be added as the game continues to be developed, but right now I can’t say a lot positive about the system as it stands. There’s hope for it, but right now it feels very fetch-and-carry and boring. It’s a good way to make money in the early game, but it gets boring very fast. 

Bannerlord: Graphics

Bannerlord Graphics 

Bannerlord is not an ugly game. I want to get that out of the way early on. Its graphics are decent, and some things like lighting and metal textures and reflections are really quite nice. That being said, if I was looking at it purely from a graphical standpoint I’d have to say that it really doesn’t stand out. The Mount and Blade franchise has never been synonymous with great graphics, and in that regard this one is definitely amazing by the standards set by the series, however with games like the remake of Resident Evil 3 and Doom Eternal coming within weeks of it, it feels decidedly last generation.

Bannerlord’s graphics shine most with its environments and its clothing/armor/weapon textures. However it really begins to feel dated with its humans. Their faces are nice enough, but with little to no range of facial animations, human interactions quickly begin to feel a little cardboard. 

Ultimately at it’s very best, in the midst of combat with light streaming down on your armored cavalry as they charged after a routed army through a lush green forest, Bannerlord can feel almost as pretty as Witcher 3...but it never beats it. It would be a far greater achievement back in 2015 when Witcher 3 came out. 

Bannerlord: Developer

Bannerlord was developed and published by TaleWorlds Entertainment, an independent game studio in Ankara, Turkey. They opened their doors in 2005, working on their founder’s passion project, which would become the original Mount and Blade game. Since their doors opened, they have only worked on the Mount & Blade series, releasing three more titles (Including Bannerlord) and working with the modding community to release the Viking Conquest mod, as a standalone release. 

As a developer, they definitely deserve some respect. For an early access title, Bannerlord works really well. It has its bugs, and I’ve had it crash three or four times but that’s not too bad for a game only a few weeks into early access. Also, they’ve been releasing patches several times a week, so it certainly at this point doesn’t feel like the community is going to have any issues with the title not being properly supported. If the company’s track record is consistent, we probably won’t be getting any DLC for Bannerlord. 

Bannerlord: Price

This is usually where I’d say it’s too expensive. Currently, it retails at $50 USD, which in my opinion is really steep for an unfinished game. I’m usually first in line to complain about developers releasing something early access, basically making us into their bug testers and then having the gall to charge us the price of a full finished game. That being said, this is one of the rare times where I’m going to say I’m actually not that unhappy with it. This game really comes across less like it’s unfinished as it’s unpolished. Bannerlord no doubt has a lot of content still to be added to it, but if they didn’t add anything more to it from this point forward...honestly I’d still say it was worth the price.

There’s no microtransactions or additional content for the game for sale at the moment, so it’ll just be the one purchase for everything available. Which is becoming consistently rarer these days. 

Bannerlord is currently only available on Steam, and presently can only be played on Windows computers. 

The Verdict: 9/10

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