Mount & Blade 2 Bannerlord Review - Is It Good or Bad?
Mount and Blade is a legendary franchise, but we've all seen the outcome of games stuck in developement hell. Does this game live up to it's predecessor? Does it flop on it's face and suffocate in the Aserai sands?
Today I’m going to be talking about Mount &Blade Bannerlord. You may have heard of it. And some of you may have wondered whether it lived up to the hype following the series after Mount and Blade Warband (and whether it was worth it’s hefty price tag of 50 bucks). In this review, I’m going to be breaking down Bannerlord piece by piece to tell you definitively: is this game good or bad?
About Mount & Blade 2 Bannerlord
To start with broad strokes, Bannerlord is a medieval strategy/rpg sandbox developed by Taleworlds that throws you into the divided continent of Calradia. There, eight countries complete with different cultures and troops constantly war with each other for total control of Calradia.
Bannerlord was announced in 2012 to a lot of excitement, and when it came out in April 2020, it’s player base soared past that of even new releases Doom Eternal and Resident Evil 3 Remake (on the same weekend it came out no less!) Even at the time of this article being written, the average player base is around 11,000 people a day.
Bannerlord’s Story
Bannerlord’s only real piece of plot is the main quest, which is to acquire the dragon banner and either form your own kingdom with it or support an existing kingdom with it (which is still make-your-own story.) It is also incredibly tedious.
The story in Bannerlord is...disparate lore you find by reading a lot of dialogue text. The game is a sandbox in almost every sense of the word, including the story. You get to build the story you want through the actions of your character, but there is very little in terms of scripted plot in the game.
(Keep in mind that the game is in early access, and this is hopefully subject to change in the future).
Bannerlord’s Gameplay
Battle Showcase
Let me walk you through what it’s like to play a campaign of Bannerlord. I say campaign because there is no single game of Bannerlord, and play sessions will vary a lot by day to day. A campaign on this game can last hundreds of hours. And by the end of it, you’ll probably come crawling back for more, trembling as you click that New Campaign button once again.
So, you click that button for the first or hundredth time and you get brought into a screen chock-full of character creation options, including randomization options for every detail and your character as a whole. You can even customize the voice of your character, which you will likely be hearing a lot yelling INFANTRY or ARCHERS or CHAAAAAAARGE! So choose wisely.
Next you get the RPG elements of the game rolling in, with the game allowing you to choose your native country’s culture (you get different buffs for different cultures, such as 20% faster leveling of your troops). After that, you get lists of options for where you came from and what you did from childhood to adulthood. These options dictate what your starting skills look like, including what you can level up into easier from the start.
There are 18 different skill trees you can level up throughout the game, each providing different perks as you rank up in them. You can mix and match these skill trees to create what could be called classes, but there are no set in stone ones.
Pictured here are the 18 skills you can level in Bannerlord. This is the screen you look at whenever you’re making your character who you want them to be.
After all of this, you step into the world of Calradia alone, with a thousand gold pieces in your pocket and nowhere to go but up (or held captive by looters only to be traded for a few coins like a cow or piece of grain, but we won’t go into that here.) You will go into villages and towns to recruit a few men and buy some food to feed them with your gold, then you will go and fight bandits (or become one). Overtime, you and your troops will level up, your max party size will increase, and you will join a country or make your own and begin warring against the eight nations.
In this game, you can do whatever you want. Be a blacksmith, or a caravaneer that goes from town to town buying and selling goods for profit. Kill innocent villagers and take their money. Become a country’s vassal or mercenary and go to war for king and country. The possibilities are endless, and that is where the fun is in Bannerlord.
There are 55 towns and 68 castles across 230 square kilometers of map in Bannerlord. The place is massive. You can own as many towns and castles as you can take and keep, and each come with villages to defend and benefit from. You can recruit companions from these towns to perform many tasks, such as governing your settlements, operating caravans or leading war parties.
That’s not all that is big in this game either. The game allows for there to be 1,000 troops on the screen in any given battle. You can have more troops in a battle, but they come in as the original 1,000 on screen dies. It is hard to describe the absolute epic scene that 1,000 men storming a city wall or fighting on the field of battle creates. It’s pretty awesome, and does not get old quickly.
This game is full of all sorts of great things, but there is a downside. It is early access, and because of that it is missing some important things. Some of the biggest issues are that the diplomacy systems between countries are not fleshed out, the systems for managing and using settlements and castles aren't much better, there are enough bugs to be noticeable, and the AI can be very clunky in combat (especially in sieges). This isn’t everything wrong with the game, but the majority of the downside isn’t in what’s wrong with the game, it’s just in what it's missing right now.
With everything factored in, this game is endlessly replayable. I have rarely seen a person who owns this game have less than 100 hours in it, and I have commonly seen them have 200 or 300. It isn’t perfect, but it’s unique, it’s different every time, and it’s fun as hell.
A side note I have to make with this game is that the modding community is incredible, and literally better everyday. Mods like Diplomacy add almost everything missing from the diplomacy system currently, and mods like Calradia Expanded Kingdoms add more than two dozen towns and castles along with 8 more kingdoms! And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
Bannerlord Combat
Combat System Showcase
The combat system in the game is a very different free-aim type of fighting. It is physics based, so how fast you or your weapon are going when you hit the opponent, how much armor they are wearing and where the blow lands all factor into how much damage you’ve dealt with a hit. The weapons themselves also have damage stats, but all are heavily affected by those three factors.
Imagine yourself in a one-handed sword duel with an enemy. Instead of pressing different buttons to swing your sword in different ways, you look slightly in that direction and press the attack button, and you swing that way. The same goes for blocking. You can attack or block left to right or up and down. This makes for combat that is easy to learn, but hard and rewarding to master.
Projectiles work a little differently. If you have a bow, a crosshair of three semicircles show up when you aim, and tighten until you get the most accurate shot you can. If you are on horseback, or move while aiming, your shot can go all over the place. However, if you have a high enough level in either throwing or bow, these factors can be mitigated quite a bit.
That brings me to the combat skills section. Fighting with a type of weapon levels up your proficiency with that weapon type. These skill trees, like all skill trees, have perks you unlock as you get further into them. Combat perks range from making your swing speed faster to increasing your troops movement speed to being able to deflect arrows with a two-handed sword.
Multiplayer combat and campaign combat are exactly the same, and they work as such. Hitboxes are tight, and skill in timing, blocking and positioning will allow you to win fights in multiplayer just like they will in a campaign.
The sound effects and combat animations in this game are good. They aren’t anything that’ll blow your mind, but they are satisfying enough to keep you immersed. Arrows will whizz by your head and emit a flesh-piercing sound as your siege buddy goes down. Swords will knock against wooden shields like a drum. Overall, if you don’t like it, there’s always a mod to fix it or there will be.
Bannerlord’s Quest/Mission System
The quest system in this game sucks. Thankfully, it’s not the point of the game. All quests here are opportunities to brown-nose town npcs so you can recruit more troops at once and get better prices when you trade. They are as almost all as follows: Kill some bandits for me, solve a family dispute with poor dialogue for me, trade for me, or on rare occasion, go do war stuff like raiding for me (which you would probably already be doing).
There is one unique quest in the game that is equally monotonous but serves an interesting purpose. The main quest has you talk to *far* too many people to learn about an artifact you have a piece of called the Dragon Banner. Once you assemble it, you can give it to a country to support and join them or make your own kingdom (this is the cool part). It's important to note that if you do give it to an existing country and join them, in the game's current state they will just be attacked endlessly by everyone for no added benefit.
Bannerlord’s Graphics
Graphics Showcase
This game has great graphics for the atmosphere it wants to create. They are not breathtaking on their own, but when two armies clash, everything comes together exactly like it should. Really, when looking at individual npcs or just walking around, the graphics look rather last generation. For some reason that I can’t totally explain though, when Bannerlord hits it’s groove, it’s graphics do too.
Combat especially is where the visuals shine. You can’t get this experience anywhere else. Hundreds of men on either side charging and clashing, horse archers poising their bows and firing into the mob, the dancing blob of swords, spears and shields spraying red with blood and leaving their wielders completely covered in crimson. It’s nothing short of completely immersive.
Bannerlord’s Developer
Taleworlds Entertainment are the developers of Bannerlord, and they do an excellent job keeping up with their games. Bannerlord released with a ton of bugs, and still has plenty enough to be noticeable, but Taleworlds makes it their mission to quash them. The first week the game was released, they put out an update everyday filled with bug patches and glitch fixes. They also quite regularly put out significant updates to the game’s main features, adding in lots of new content for free, often in response to their player base’s suggestions.
Bannerlord’s Price
This game currently costs 50$ when it’s not on sale. You can purchase it on pretty much any PC game-selling website, including but not limited to Steam, GOG, HumbleBundle, and EpicGames. There are no pay-to-win elements and no in-game purchases as of now, though DLCs are likely coming in the near future.
Pros:
- One of the best modding communities around
- Completely unique strategy experience
- Massive scale, both in map and battles
- Developers that care and keep up with the game
- A ton of freedom to play the game how you want
- Great multiplayer community
- Great RPG elements
Cons:
- Limited number of features currently in the vanilla game
- Fairly buggy
- It’s a little pricey
- Graphics can look really weird sometimes (especially on people’s faces)
- It really does have a terrible quest system
- You need a monster of a computer to run it well and to its full potential or you need a service like GeForce Now
FINAL VERDICT:
Look, this isn’t a hard rating. This game really is most of what it’s chalked up to be, and because of the modding community and the developers working hard, this game has just about everything you need to make it what you want it to be. I give this rating based on the vanilla game in its current state, with no mods added. This game is *easily* an 8.5/10.
If you liked this article, check out the links below:
https://www.gamersdecide.com/pc-game-news/10-best-medieval-strategy-games-pc
https://www.gamersdecide.com/articles/games-like-chivalry-medieval-warfare
https://www.gamersdecide.com/pc-game-news/15-best-sword-fighting-games-play-2016-pc-2
