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Oct 28, 2022 · Mount & Blade 2: Bannerlord keeps you busy. Even more so than its predecessor, Bannerlord's setup is a dream come to life, splicing together roleplaying, strategy and medieval duels in a big ol ...
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- A shallow grind threatens the sublime combat of this tactical action game.
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By Jon Bolding
Updated: Nov 5, 2022 3:59 am
Posted: Oct 31, 2022 9:40 pm
The claustrophobic press of frenzied melee, whistling of missiles, and thunderous charge of cavalry are often represented in games, but rarely so personally as in the Mount & Blade series. It’s not often I get the feeling I’m experiencing what must’ve been the needs of a commander at eye-level on the field trying to maneuver his forces, or being forced to desperately scramble among bodies for a quiver of arrows or fresh shield. This is the appeal of Mount & Blade 2: Bannerlord, and it outweighs all of the holes, bugs, and underwhelming strategy and roleplaying mechanics you have to wade through to get here. When you reach the battlefield, this low-fantasy medieval simulation is unmatched.
Bannerlord drops you into the shoes of a capable, temporarily impoverished wannabe in a sandbox world based on late antiquity, complete with a fragmenting Roman Empire stand-in. It's an engaging scenario for its variety of combatants, mercenary bands, and warring societies, each with a unique historically-based way of fighting. In contrast, Bannerlord's main story is very thin, but revolves around finding the remnants of an ancient and symbolic banner – then deciding whether to use it to finish off the empire or take the banner to reunite its fragmented territories.
It qualifies as a sandbox because how you rise to power is largely up to you, whether on a trade fortune, becoming a famous mercenary, or working from inside one of the eight kingdoms. From there it's all about conquest in the name of your chosen nation – or throw that out the window and start a faction of your own. That said, the actual kingdom-management strategy is weak due to shallow mechanics and lackluster AI – it's really just an excuse to raise big armies and smash them together. You do that via maneuvering in an overworld strategic layer before dropping into hybrid action real-time strategy battles where you directly control only yourself, but can issue commands to your AI-driven troops.
No, I want to experience it pure first
Yes, but only cosmetic stuff or minor tweaks that don't change the gameplay
Yes, I'll install anything that looks like it could be cool
Much of that anemia would be a forgivable indulgence if Bannerlord wasn't so rife with simple bugs. Quests will trigger relating to a faction you're not part of. Perks from leveling up, constructing buildings, or enacting kingdom laws sometimes just… have no effect at all. Multiplayer is rife with network and server errors. Perhaps most pervasive are the graphical glitches, which are legion but mostly involve gaps in weapon models and an array of clipping that speaks to a broader lack of attention to detail. Seriously: the would-be empress Rhagaea, one of the eight most important NPCs in the world, consistently has her chin clipping out of her chainmail coif. What the hell is that?
Fighting is the meat here. The massive clash of as many as a thousand soldiers on the field is unrivaled, at least at the scale and level of simulation Bannerlord attempts. Whereas the overworld map is very transparently not a simulation of a real world, the combat tries to stick to at least historically plausible outcomes, so swinging a sword often feels desperate and real. No matter how potent you are as a single combatant, a handful of opponents of decent skill can quickly overwhelm you: you are not a god of the battlefield who cuts down a dozen enemies at a stroke. You're just another person, albeit a smarter one than the AI grunts.
On that person-to-person level, Bannerlord's combat is delightful. Chaotic and confusing at first, I soon started to understand the interplay of the four attack angles, parrying, blocking, and types of weapons. Every attack has its velocity measured against the target's, subtracting or adding damage relatively, and tracking the location hit to determine how armored it is. It tracks relative weapon and shield position, allowing attacks to catch on an opponent's counterattack or nearby object. Weapon weight plays a factor, as does elevation, swing length, and even what part of your weapon hits the enemy: Hitting someone with the haft of your axe, for example, does far less damage than the head.
Learning all of these little details, then tweaking the difficulty to suit yourself, is what makes Bannerlord’s combat superb. Desperately aiming your attacks, picking targets, and outfighting opponents is pulse-pounding absorption entirely different from the more furious combat of over-the-top action games. That's most on display in multiplayer, where you can test your skill against others in one-on-one duels. For some that's really the whole game, as the fighting-game-like interaction of weapon options builds depth.
Oh, and then throw your character's personal skill out the window when you get into large-scale fights against the AI or another player. Your quick blade might matter a lot in the arena, but when you're crushed into a melee among dozens of others there's no easy escape from enemy attacks, and wide sweeps of your sword are as likely to catch on an ally's spear haft as strike your opponent directly. The chaotic clash of shield walls, or the mixed scrum of a running cavalry battle, is the absolute peak of Bannerlord.
The metagame of play here is wild due to Bannerlord's robust commands and troop variety.
“
Playing online, Bannerlord's Captains mode has two teams of six go up against each other, with each player in command of their own squad of soldiers. The metagame of play here is wild due to Bannerlord's robust commands and troop variety.
Organizing and commanding your soldiers is a high point. Figuring out how to use terrain, elevation, formations, and more on any of the many, quite varied battlefields is a really nice pre-battle puzzle. One hundreds-strong block of infantry is fine in an open field, but terrible for siege assault, for example. I love breaking my infantry off into a formation of pikes when I breached enemy walls, letting those long-reach weapons clear the gap while the heavily armored and shielded troops stormed the intact walls via siege towers. It takes a bit of learning, but thankfully bringing up the orders menu in combat slows time way down (not in multiplayer, of course), giving you precious moments to consider orders and placement before executing a plan.
It’s a shame that Mount & Blade 2: Bannerlord lets you auto-resolve its glorious action/real-time strategy combat but forces you to endure dozens of hours of laborious and repetitive activities on its dry, flavorless overworld map. If I could skip over the bugs, shallow grinds, and frustrating non-combat activities around building up your faction a...
- Jon Bolding
Oct 25, 2022 · The horns sound, the ravens gather. An empire is torn by civil war. Beyond its borders, new kingdoms rise. Gird on your sword, don your armour, summon your followers and ride forth to win glory on the battlefields of Calradia. Establish your hegemony and create a new world out of the ashes of the old. Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord is the eagerly awaited sequel to the acclaimed medieval combat ...
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Oct 28, 2022 · Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord is a great follow-up to the previous games in the series. It has some kinks that need to be ironed out and some things will just remain imperfect forever.
Nov 23, 2022 · Good vs Bad. Has huge scope for playstyle flexibility. Can build your own epic tales. More accessible than the previous game. Large-scale battles. A bit rickety in places. Still quite overwhelming. Mount and Blade 2: Bannerlord is very much a superior sequel in so many ways. It’s still a bit of a brick wall to get past in terms of ...
Oct 25, 2022 · Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord is the eagerly awaited sequel to the acclaimed medieval combat simulator and role-playing game Mount & Blade: Warband. Oct 31, 2022 - A shallow grind threatens the ...
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Apr 13, 2020 · Verdict. It’s easy to focus on all the ways Mount & Blade II is still stuck in a rut starting out, but Bannerlord is an onion with lots of new layers that show themselves once you start to ...
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