Publisher: TaleWorlds Entertainment
Developer: TaleWorlds Entertainment
Platform: Xbox One, PC, PS4
Genre: Action RPG

Takes a person who played a game like this to understand how European devs have conquered the world with medieval simulators. There's a lot of the old mechanics that comeback implemented alongside newer ones. Taking this game's grand scale further with new battle systems, more robust features, better visuals, and so on. Even if the majority of the game is somewhat similar to the previous one.

Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord is a prequel to the highly lauded and successful sequel of the original Mount & Blade game, Warband. While launched at its infancy last month, it still consists of large empires and settlements to explore, delegate, trade, pillage, etc. Alongside you building your own empire and making a name out of yourself.

My only bereavement comes from the lack of features, making me feel as if there's way more left to be added to the game even if we're beta testing it at a much early phase. There's also the matter of the numerous

Campaign

There are two ways to play M&B: First way, you play as one character interacting with various characters in villages, keeps or cities, or fighting your enemies in battlegrounds controlling your troops. The other is moving your armies under one banner, travelling to various settlements owned by different empires. You engage in quests, trade, conversations, battles, intermingling and so on. There's a lot you can do, playing this game, of course within the initial segments of the game, it becomes a chore of doing quests to level up, increase your stats and earn gold while the main mission has you going on fetch quests and stuff, this is before you finally get access to a brand-new kingdom.

This installment is a prequel set several hundred years before Warband. Takes place in the empire of Calradic, last couple years before the complete formation of different kingdoms. Story has a nice savior complex thing going on, but you're mostly playing the game before you even get interested as to what really is going on.

You start the game by choosing between 6 factions. Create a character choosing your background story that also picks up your character stats. Once done, playing throughout the rest of the game, your skills increases based on experience only so you must partake on various activities to increase their respective stat. Increasing your focus and base helps you learn faster and get access to newer abilities.

Combat in M&B is solid, it mostly caters to desktop players rather console because of a lot of micromanaging going on. Including especially during battles. You can set which troops stay in which formation before using said formation during battles for command. The option in this game is vast and expense, enough for you to decide how to approach your battles. You can pick between 4 different weapons/shields. Swords, spears, axe, crossbows, javelins, bows, and so on. Practicing with these help you fight better with each weapons type whether it's one-handed, two-handed or polar.

Being prepared and training your units is important, with gold to spare(and some horses), you can increase your unit ranks to make them for formidable. You can increase your army roster by recruiting more men or fighting off looters and bandits to hire their prisoners without pay or take them as prisoners before able to hire them later on. Though I wish you could decide on their repertoire as well. That would've been a lot more interesting.

Going to different settlements, keeps and citadels, you are given tasks from shop owners to lords of the houses. Some require that you deliver livestock while others have you raiding bandit camps, escorting assignments or training more soldiers for nobles. There's enough to do around for earning money, including selling your prisoners. If you want, you can walk around the settlements, converse with the locals, hire companions, get helpful information and such.

You can build up an army of over 100 soldiers provided you increase your tier level. You can even enlist companions who'll ride along with you, forming different army party as well as doing some side quests for you if they have the required skills for it. Having multiple companions, you can give them roles like Quartermaster, Engineer, Medical or Scout. They'll do much more for you like delegating once you've started your own kingdom.

Some of the skills you've acquired can be useful for persuasion attempts, this requires that you play this mini game where from certain dialogue choices, you pick which one is successful, you get points. Max out points and you've convinced that person to concede and accept your proposals.

Participate in arena tournaments in citadels and win grand prizes. Sometimes in battles such as these, even with weak stats, it's easy to just go around enemies and swing your swords. Sure they won't work out, but given with the right equipment and that you don't encumber yourself with heavier items, you can overtake them easily. This pretty much becomes cheesable after certain time. But it's difficult to maintain so in crowded battles.

This title offers something more similar compared to games like Civilization or Kingdom Come. In fact, this series was KC back in 08 and it has perfected that while offering few things unique to its gameplay loop. However, all isn't perfect. Most particularly with bandit camp raids where you're only allowed to bring along 8 members of your army primarily picked based on the first 2 formations they're in. Not letting you pick who comes or how many you want to enlist in such battles. It feels somewhat tacked on and kind of cumbersome.

What's even worse, it really takes awhile before you could build your kingdom. Lengthy process such as this sort of took away my enjoyment at times. Not to mention, 20% of the game I've spent tracking back to my older saves because of the ridiculous bugs and glitches that are stuck with the final product. Even if this game is in early access, it feels like it could have seen better days.

But it needn't be said that the game offers sooo much in spades. From launching caravans, working with other kingdoms to marrying with female nobles in keeps. Though it could also be said that the game still needs much more content as Warband has already lot more added throughout the past 10 years since its release.

Online

Much like Warband, this has a multiplayer mode. Unlike Warband, it has 3 different modes. Captain, Skirmish and Siege.

Captain is where you play as the commanding officer of your soldiers, with 12 total players in two teams, you fight in Total War style upclose against your enemies for dominion. Skirmish is domination without AI soldiers, you basically fight in a small area for holding points. Lastly, the big one is Siege. A full on castle siege with two teams of 60 players pitted against each other. It's total anarchy but it's the most definitive war experience you could get online.

Most of these modes are tons of fun as well as a good way to pass the time and fatigue from the single-player.

Production Value

Mount & Blade II is a current-gen game alright. While the character models are lackluster, the game in its big sense of scope provides great detail to nearly everything it throws at you. Playing this at my PC though, it was telling that this game is pretty demanding and requires good beefy hardware to run it. The game when it comes to performance, can stutter at times, so the need for patching couldn't come any sooner. TaleWorlds using their in-house engine for this title, with new lighting, better texture details being in-depth, large scope of scenery possible, and good post-processing. Big exception being are the facial animations though but I guess the devs assume that would serve little purpose in this game.

The soundtrack's main theme is about running kingdoms and fighting battles amidst the early medieval ages. No variation from that.

When it comes to technical coding, this game has serious kinds of bugs. Just look at the following and see what I have to deal with. These including quest bugs infuriated me a lot. Having a major effect on the enjoyment factor.

Score

My first foray in a long while into what medieval simulators be like and I can gladly say I had a quite the fun. Even if some sections held me back thanks to the bugs while also leaving me feeling like there could always be more added.

After 5-6 years in development, this game comes in short. But I guess that's why it's categorized as Early Access. Hopefully once the pandemic passes out, they'll get to adding more content shortly after a few months. But if you really want to pick this up, I'd say wait for it. Once time passes before the game finally is ready and ripe for the taking after bugs mostly sorted out.

7.5/10