Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord Reviews

The Devs have seemingly abandoned the game to be feature incomplete. They've left most of the slack to be picked up by modders, except to make matters worse they occasionally release the smallest of bug fixes just to make the modders jobs even harder. Will update review if the Devs change course.

Incredibly neglected by the developers, missing over a dozen features of the previous game. Looks really nice but after a couple dozen hours you get into the same boring routine of attacking small parties who don't challenge you, fighting and winning some easy to win but tedious and boring siege, and repeating the process over and over.

Why release a DLC when the base game has been broken and unbalanced for over a year? Are you guys skint again?

honestly what i wanted, being a field commander with a shit ton of warriors with me while using strategy to win disadvantageous battles 9/10 game.

Been with the game since it first dropped way back during Covid. Huge Warband fan here. What could have been a really good successor to Warband has instead been abandoned by the devs. While the core gameplay is satisfactory, it gets boring after a few hours. This is because the game is just insanely easy and has no real substance. Everywhere from the combat, to the strategy, wealth-building, and relationships is extremely low effort on the players part. The easy early game allows the late game to become an absolute dog-walk with literally nothing stopping you. This would be fine if it weren't for said early game. There is no reward or payoff, the game just... gifts you everything. Even founding your own kingdom is easy. There is no depth, no complexity, no difficulty, you just win. This could've been remedied by continued support from the devs, by delivering on the promises they made, but it appears they're done with the game. Yet another dev team that either couldn't or didn't want to put in the effort, and so left the future of the game to modders who are doing their job but for free and with a billion times more passion. It's sad, I was really excited to see this game build into something truly fantastic. Get it if you like what you see, if not, I will always recommend Warband for the way it fills my holes.

No major updates in a long long time. Game feels unfinished and lacking in content. Still waiting for a big patch so that I can jump back in. Until then, it's pretty much dead

This game is not what was promised. Dialogue options lead nowhere. Mechanics remain unimplemented. This could have been one of the greatest games of all time, and the developer gave up on it the moment it was released, relying on modder labour to complete it. Such a disappointment. Do not buy it.

Game is dead, no proper Updates since years. Could have been an amazing game, but everything is just barely in the state so it works but nothing more. No love, nothing special. Just an awesome foundation. Quite sad to be honest.

A bit wordy, TL;DR at the end. Coming here after the DLC announcement. I'll admit I'm a little mixed on it, since TW decided to tell none of us anything while putting out extremely tiny patches for the last 2 years. Patches that did more harm than good for the community due to messing up mods. Their excuse of "we were working on story DLC that we kept scrapping because it wasn't good" would have been fine if they had said anything about it. That being said, I recommend the game even in its current state. All the people whining about problems have hundreds of hours, or they have under 2 in which you can't have possibly seen diplomacy issues. If you play this game for hundreds of hours how can you possibly say it isn't good? I get there's issues, hell look at my time played and you can be sure I have seen them. I would not have almost 1000 hours if I thought this game was not good. One of the biggest complaints I see is "no feasts" did any of you even play Warband? Everyone back then thought feasts were annoying and constantly interfered in the wars. Go play vanilla Warband and join Swadia. Tell me just how much you love feasts after that. Then you have the issue of those teeny tiny updates busting mods. You guys know that you can just select the previous game version in Steam, so the updates you claim "add nothing" don't ruin your modlist or save? I just don't see the point in complaining about an issue that is community driven (you don't NEED mods, no matter what you feel about the game) and that can be perfectly fixed with a feature TW has opted into using specifically to cater to those people. You will know within the first 2 hours whether you like this game or not. Use the Steam refund policy if it isn't for you. There's not much depth to it, and you won't get some grand economic or diplomatic simulator like CK3 or X4. What's here is incredibly fun to me and I have to recommend it based on that. TL;DR It is a fun game. It is a good game. Could it be better? Sure. Doesn't mean it isn't enjoyable. You'll know within the first 2 hours if you like it or not.

Writing this review in the context of the recent announcement of the Warsails DLC made by Taleworlds. M&B Warband was pure lightning in a bottle. I have hundreds of hours in that game and this context also puts this review into perspective. Following Warband, M&B 2 Bannerlord has taken a decade for Taleworlds to dev and bring to market, in it's E.A form. From the get-go it received many praises for the technical aspect of it, with a proprietary engine that is, it is true, a big improvement upon the dated Warband game. It then stagnated in E.A for some time, receiving staunch criticism over its departure from the character progression systems in place in Warband to some bastardized perk system that never worked and still doesn't work (more on this in a bit) It tried to bring novelty to the M&B formula by adding an aging/birth/clan management system (if you can call it that. As i am writing this, it feels like this is too big of a word to qualify what it actually is), but in the mean time failed to add many features that were present in the original game. (actual diplomacy, relationships with nobles, courtship, books, feasts, claimants/civil wars, deserters/manhunters, actual memorable companions, the ability to start as a nobody/or start with interesting builds, city ambushes, etc.) In many ways, Bannerlord added some management systems in the settlements you own that were taken from the Warband modding scene, but misimplemented them in a way that renders them very much sidelined and uninteresting. Trading started broken in EA, was touched and broken a great many times, and is still largely entirely derpy and poor, which by this point in the product life cycle is a recurring farcical theme. One big addition Bannerlord brought was Smithing. Smithing brought the promise of gear you make yourself and a side progression to provide an alternative way of making money. It's broken. It's always been broken. It's so insanely broken that it *is the one true way to make money in this game, by breaking any and all game pace until you get good enough at it that you can print currency. I have heard that the reason this gameloop remains broken is that it's a brainchild of the big boss at Taleworlds and that thus no one dares even acknowledge how absolutely broken it is and rework. It's a brillant idea, but someone needs to wear the pants and say it has to be redone right. On the character progression side of things, Warband had an insteresting albeit rather classic system of character sheet that combined stat increments and perks linked to those increments in a way very much reminiscent of classic RPGs, combined with a learn by doing approach for weapon skills. Progressive yet impactful progression that keeps you going for more because of a well thought out pacing and meaningful/impactful upgrades. Bannerlord tried to do something new, and ended up screwing the pooch hard, electing instead to have a much, much more incremental progression and a slew of perks ranging from absolutely broken to meaningless with the occasional -i-break-the-game-lel perk thrown in there by good measure of incompetence. The xp calculation system also changed, and in that as well as in its perks there is such a thing as "Taleworlds maths" with nonsensical calculations not consistent with descriptive happening all the time. The AI also was flawed, in movement, lack of defense from AI, bad decision making, etc. Some mods likely came to address it. Taleworlds also thought they addressed it but linked in to difficulty so that if you want to have a middling experience on average, you will have to deal with brain dead AI, and reciprocally, if you want to play on bannerlord difficulty, you will largely have to cheese the AI to get hits in because they will block everything. In 1 on 1 it was very pronounced, but it was also visible in group battles where a numerical actual advantage (how many can actually reach concurrently) was likely to be the single main driver for whether or not your guys win or lose a battle. In that context, factors that should matter a lot like troop tier, or troop specialization (defensive infantry/cavalry, etc) take the backseat and you will see top tier troops get absolutely wrecked by lower peons regularly. Faction balance was flawed as well. This was due in part to poorly thought faction traits (this received some measure of patching) but also just debatable performances on troops. For instance, people have done extensive testing and confirmed that sturgians which are supposed to have the best or almost the best infantry regularly perform the worst. Or that some troops have equipment pieces assigned to them that aren't consistent with the tier they're on, relative to the gear their inferior tiers have, or relative to the other factions similar tiered units. Combat was just a measure worse compared to warband. RBM (the mod) to some extent fixes some issues, notably with damage calculations that has to do with how kinetic impacts are calculated, but long story short, the impact of armours in this is not consistent with what is to be expected coming from warband. I get that this probably doesn't evoke much to a newcomer to the series, but in a game where the core loop involves simulating battle, not getting the damage calculations/penetration right is a BIG deal. Factions wise, Warband gave us 6 factions and Bannerlord also gives 6. However some weird and debatable amalgamation occurred where by if Sarranids became Aserai and Khergit became Khuzait, Vlandia effectively amalgamated Rhodoks and Swadians, and Sturgia did so for Nords and Vaegirs. This effectively diluted meaningful factions into others for no gain. Then Bannerlord launched, much of its promised roadmap features not being even implemented yet (most notably the dynamic battle terrain cells or whatever they called it, but not only). Was everything mentioned above addressed? no. Not even close. In fact we've had year-long periods of silence coming from Taleworlds as to on-going developments and intentions to fix what was broken/to be improved/promised but not delivered. This current major patch we are on, we have been on since 2024 with not a single post about the future. Some minute patches (including the now famous 84kb patch of doom that breaks all the mods) have come out (without versions or notes tbh), but nothing concerning the next version. And so we arrive to today. Taleworlds just announced its upcoming release of.... a paid DLC. This paid DLC brings a new faction (see above my comments about warband), and naval combat. Not too much else is known at this point (not even the DLC's pricing!) Some of what Taleworlds calls "scrapped work" will make its way to the base game for free (oh so benevolent are they indeed) but reading the details, you realize that this "scrapped work" encompasses work that's directly and indirectly lifted or at the very least strongly influenced by unpaid work from the Bannerlord Modding scene. We still don't have any visibility at this stage on whether or not Taleworlds will deem it fit to eventually go back to the work they promised to deliver on the base game, including reworks of the flawed/missing mechanics detailed above. What we do know for sure though, is the clear intent from this company to tack on a paid DLC on a rushed E.A product, as well as the readiness to poach work from unpaid modders and call it their own, make you pay for it and not even mention compensating the modders for their work. So to conclude, thanks for reading this review if you made it this far, do not buy Bannerlord, in fact i would recommend not engaging with Taleworlds alltogether as a company. But if you are this drawn to the mount and blade series, i recommend you play the acclaimed Warband instead. I will of course amend this review should Taleworlds dial back on the practice of issuing this DLC at a premium and probably turn this review in a much more favourable light.