Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord

The strategy + roleplay aspects make it a unique experience I love advancing my Character, Clan and Castles / Towns. If this would've a coop-campaign I'd love it even more!

While it is incredibly frustrating that this game feels very unfinished and lacking in its vanilla state, the mods available cover for most of its glaring holes. With that said it's still one of my all time favorite games, nothing comes close to the experience a playthrough delivers.

As much as I would like to recomend this, I can't. Just because the vast majority of the enjoyment comes from mods. I have 150 hrs and 0 accievements because I simply cannot play this without mods. If I were to recomend something about this game, is the workshop

Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord is everything you love about Warband, but with a new coat of paint, more horses, and a slightly better chance of dying dramatically.

The enemy AI? Let’s just say they could use a few lessons in basic tactics. You’ll often find them charging headfirst into battle like they’re trying to impress the local tavern girl—entertaining... for about 10 minutes. Then you realize it's the same thing every time.

We’re still lacking in diplomacy options, but otherwise, it’s the same chaotic medieval mayhem we all love.

Has the game changed dramatically since pre-release? No, not really. But hey, the modding community is the real MVP here—they’re adding more fun, fixes, and horse armor as time goes on!

The quests? Let’s just say they’re repetitive. Rescue a caravan, defeat a bandit, ride around a village… rinse and repeat until you’re ready to throw your sword at a wall.

Overall, it’s a good time. 8/10, would die charging a shield wall again.

Its so sad. I have 36 hours in this game and then after update it crashes every time I try to start it up.
Ive had this problem for years now and revisit the game from time to time to check if something changes but it doesnt. Cant play it and it sucks!
But when it worked i loved it.

After 200+ hours, Bannerlord still feels fresh. It’s a perfect mix of strategy, medieval combat, and open-ended freedom.
You start as a nobody and can rise through war, politics, or trade. Battles are massive, the world reacts to your choices, and no two playthroughs are the same.
There are some bugs, but they don’t ruin the experience. Bannerlord isn’t just a game—it’s a medieval sandbox where you forge your own path.
Rating: 9/10 – A must-play for medieval and strategy fans.

If crack were a game, it would be this one. I've logged 2500 hours between the pre-release version and now, and I've been playing games like this since ... they were invented? My first system was an Atari, so you do the math lol. Some things could be improved, sure, but I have never in my 35 years of gaming found a game this good. The prior version (Warband) I got so obsessed with, it actually got me to quit smoking cigarettes because I was so immersed in the game. Bannerlord is even better. Highly, highly recommend.

I recommend this game, BUT - Only with mods. The game standalone feels like it was left behind. They made the core game and then basically left it in the dust after a few tweaks here and there, but it's severely lacking in content.

So if you like to mod you games for the ultimate experience, ABSOLUTELY get this game.
If you like to play games standalone, sure you might be able to get some satisfaction from the game, for a while - but it gets dull fast.
(Also too many damn exploits in standalone.)

Just a mess.

Zero depth: wars decided at random, characters are soulless with extremely ugly faces. Every character in this game is ugly, the armor is ugly, the voices are terrible.

I could spend dozens of hours modding this to fix it probably but there's no point.

Just play warband

Mods? Yeah, definitely mods.

Don't waste your money. The game was released in an incomplete state, the modding scene is basically dead due to the fact that the Devs keep giving useless updates that break every single mod and makes your game unlaunchable. Go buy Warband instead, as Bannerlord isn't much of a step up from that game. Extremely disappointed in how this game turned out and I wish I could get a refund and just be done this with company for good.

Abandoned game. The developers are so lazy they fix about 10 bugs a month since release instead of adding any real content. The game feels completely empty. It's basically just Warband with better graphics—nothing new at all. Feels like they just took a Warband mod, polished the graphics, and called it a new game. It still lacks so much content in the campaign.

There’s no proper diplomacy, kingdom management, family/dynasty systems, technology, or meaningful relationships. The AI is extremely dumb. You can’t construct new villages or castles, and scouting is so boring you just see party arrows on the map.

Battles are fun at first, but they get boring quickly. The AI either camps at their spawn waiting for you to push, or they just send wave after wave at you. The morale feature feels unfinished and pointless. The only cool thing is that you can separate units and control them individually, like putting archers on the backline in a line formation to pick off enemies from a distance, while cavalry flanks the sides. But even that gets old after a while.

The only thing keeping this game alive is multiplayer and mods and even mods barely work half the time, plus they take a ton of effort to set up.

Three years of constant bug fixes instead of adding content.

For 50 euros? No way. If I could refund it, I definitely would.

I was so hyped for this game before release. I waited patiently for content updates because the game was in such bad shape at launch. But after 3 years? Still no real content updates. I don’t understand how people can actually rate this game highly. They’ve probably never played Warband and don’t know how much better it was. This is basically the same game with way better graphics—for 50 euros.

Look, I want to love this game - I've clearly played it a lot, going back years to when it was pretty early access. I was a big fan of Warband, and hoped this could give the same experience as that. Unfortunately, it's basically the same game it was back in early access -- the devs don't really do anything other than introduce 'updates' that tend to break as much as they fix and, most importantly, completely brick all of your mods.

That last part about mods is key, and the reason why this is a negative review even with over 800 hours logged (at least half of which was using mods, like Calradia Expanded). Other than that, all of my complaints could easily be fixed by the modding community that, at least earlier on, was very active and dedicated (like it was in Warband). That was where Warband shined -- there were a TON of mods that not only improved the base game, but also other conversion mods that entirely transformed it into various new (and even better) games, like POP and Bretwalda (which was turned into an official Warband DLC, Viking Conquest). Unfortunately, Talewords has made that next to impossible here - even tiny updates break pretty much every mod, and most of the modding community has understandably grown frustrated with the ceaseless task of rebuilding their mods because Talewords changes a few pixels in a model or makes it so you can buy some helmet that you never noticed you couldn't get before.

In any event, the base game is mediocre -- fun, but shallow and very repetitive, particularly once you get to end-game. It's lacking in basic features, like diplomacy, and while mods have traditionally existed to add those sort of things that TW never bothered to add, good luck keeping them up to date when they constantly break. TW has given up on adding meaningful new content, but they don't allow the game to flourish via mods like Warband did, leaving it the worst of both worlds here...vanilla lacks in content and has little prospect for getting better, and the modding community can't fix that issue because TW continuously breaks the mods and disrespects that community.

Buy on sale, perhaps, but don't expect it to have the longevity of Warband.

Мне кажется Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord можно описать одной фразой - "Игра потерянного потенциала". Это хорошая качественная игра, она мне нравится, но играя в неё я часто испытываю какую грусть, обидно, что так много можно было сделать и так мало сделали. Очень обидно.

Base game is very shallow, but try to mod it and stuff will go wrong at every possible opportunity and it will make you wanna pull out your hair in clumps

This game is not Mount and Blade II. This game is a broken promise. Don't buy it unless a mod comes out that you really want to play (hopefully the Star Wars mod comes out for singleplayer on this game).

The devs delayed the game as long as possible to get subsidized, released it into Early Access, and then gave the game less features than Warband. There's less diplomacy. The quests are fewer. The only additions are the sieges (kind of okay) and a crafting system that takes about 12 real life hours of grinding the same few items to level up to unlock new items. The combat and sieges are okay, but they're not worth the price.

Abandoned game. No respect for the consumer. No respect for the work of the modders. People at TW are horrible people that took the money and ran. We want content. not random bug fixes that no one notices and breaks the mods that people put hours of unpaid work into. The game is even missing features from warband lmao.

This used to be a good game, then Taleworlds ruined it with constant pointless updates that break mods and create additional bugs.

Honestly, this game did not live up to the hype it promised years ago.

The only justice Bannerlord has that its got nicer graphics and better battle mechanics.

Bannerlord is meant to be a Sandbox game but there really is no real content there to sink into.

Mods and Multiplayer do not even have proper support as Taleworlds continue to push out "updates" with no actual new content to Sandbox or to the story, additionally any gameplay issues that players have had since Bannerlords' "1.0" release have not been addressed but hey, at least Taleworlds patches will break your saves lmao.

I do not recommend this game. Although I love the Warband and all the warband mods, Bannerlord to gets old and boring very quickly. There is nothing to do and this happens very quickly. I may have played for many hours, but I realize that at no point was I having very much fun. The game lacks content. It's too sandbox and not enough features to make use of that.
What can I do? When I take a kingdom it gets boring quickly. Please add more content. This game feels unfinished and abandoned by the developers.

Owned this since release and was stoked to see where things go. This game is such a fucking disappointment and I don't see any reason to play this over Warband with how bare bones and half baked every single aspect of this game is.

One of the best and most addicting game I have ever played. I have 90 hours of gameplay in the past week of owning this game. If you are looking at skipping meals and losing weight, buy this game.

A very good mix of strategy map movement with personal combat on the field of battle. Taking control of your character on the battlefield is very rewarding and keeps you coming back for more killing. The dynamic systems for empires and kingdoms fighting for control and the economy system always moving and changing goods is 2nd to none, I played Eve which was spawned from a system built for real world stock movement, I think this game does its economy better by having the smaller scale and faster pace. The addition of a complete RPG element that choices spawn on to your fighting, is complete gold.

There are some gripes, I did get stuck in a falling animation a couple of times in siege battles, forcing to rely upon the AI to take the town, and once an AI enemy fell and AI did not know how to kill them, forcing me to retreat. But these have happened in siege battles and not other.

The skill upgrading is great, it is not just selecting a skill up, but then needing to work at it is good, however the differences of working on skills is vast. In a single siege I went from 50's Engineering to ~200 by using siege weapons, I then went from level ~270s Bow to past 300 in another siege because I had unlimited arrows and they never went up to fight me, that is over 100k xp

The late game seems to lag for me, the beginning building up your name and clan, being an unlanded merc is the best parts of the game. However doing the bandit holds gets annoying, I would rather choose to ambush or just go during the day and fight or challenge the boss

I've put a lot of hours into Bannerlord. I can recommend it for the idea of battle simulation, but as of now that is it. Quality battle simulation. I feel immersed in the action prideful of my renown earned from it.
I despise the diplomacy. It actually got worse as the updates progressed. It devolved down to money. Are you getting tribute or giving it. You used to be able to exchange fiefs, equipment, supplies, plus money for peace. No longer an option, just good old cash. This is down right stupid. If you consider diplomacy to be a tribute system you are simple. No alliances, trade agreements, border negotiation, nothing. Don't say you can do diplomacy if this is it. Its fucking lying.

Economy has potential but is wasted. Work is need to make it fully operational. I love trying to be a merchant lord in any game. Bannerlord taunts you with this, but the rewards are so paltry that the game forces you to go back to warfare. You can do it, you just wont be successful overall. You shop ownership is maxed out very quickly, same with caravans. But you can own as many Towns or Castles as you want. This is done to coerce you back to the fight.
Warfare is excellent in battle, crap outside of it. Your vassals armies are short lived and uncontrollable. You cannot direct them in a unified fashion. Sieges are ok, but I just learned that my stashes of food that I horded in my castles and keeps will be untouched by the garrison, even when starving. This is such an obvious problem that makes no sense.
Court intrigue, nill.
Ruling your kingdom, bare damn bones.

The worst of all is the campaign. I just rage quit because I learned that I "Unified the Empire" 256 day ago. This was news to me, seeing as I was in a war with the northern Empire and paying tribute to the Western Empire. This ruined my game plans utterly. The campaign punishes you for participating as well. You can literally ignore it and just play sandbox. If you play it then you are forced in to a war with the three most powerful factions against you. If you lose than all you work is gone. If you win than the game is basically over at that point.

They have released the game as completed and no longer in beta. This is unacceptable. I will not purchase any more titles from the publisher.

Despite the significant hours played on this game, i still feel it deserves a negative review. The vanilla version of the game is extremely bare bones, thin and repetitive. The end game is just wack a mole trying to conquer all cities and castles. Very little actual RPG elements and no quality or variety to dialogue. The AI is garbage, with very poor siege tactics and will make very poor war decisions such as besieging a castle in on the opposite side of the map, instead of besieging a closer castle that actually has value to the war effort. Probably 50-100 hours of my time on steam has been just trying to get mods to work to make this game somewhat enjoyable that is not dry and repetitive, with little game play of just vanilla version. A game should NOT require mods to be enjoyable and actually make the game function correctly. I can understand complete overhaul mods or troop change mods being an exception, but needing mods to make AI function correctly, mods to actually add diplomacy such as alliances and non aggression pacts, or making sure armies dont simply starve themselves to death is baffling. Without the modding community supporting it with crutches, this game would be dead

They just make the most cringe changes to slow down the early game because the end game is so shallow... Still hardly any diplomacy options 0 way to go into a conflict with allies from different factions... What the point of making friends with Lords from other nations when the end result is them "demanding" less gold from you when you meet in the field when your nations are at war. Spend 100+ hours on a file climbing to the King/Queen position in your chosen faction or your solo empire... Just so that the 16 days it takes to travel to a wack castle that you are trying to defend just for it to be taken by the time you get there and to have 1200 person army's in your faction walk right past it because I guess they are scared of the 600 man siege, and somehow I (the fkn KING) apparently cant tell an army in my faction what their orders are??? Just another eternal EA game (even tho the devs say its 1.0) unfulfilled roadmap they will kick down the road till Mount and Blade 3 (that they will be charging AAA sticker price for)... Fkn Joke...

I've played M&B Warband for hundreds of hours, bought this game because user reviews are very positive

I play M&B for the single player, but immediately I found some issues:
1. Barely any noticeable improvement (graphic-wise) from M&B Warband
2. There are some added mechanic, but those mechanic are basic and have issues (like fief voting system)
3. The AI is atrocious
4. etc...

From those point, the conclusion is if you wanted to buy bannerlord as an upgrade from warband to play Singplayer...it is not recommended, From update cadence and changelog doubt dev will fix these issues.

This game feels utterly neglected by its developers, who appear disinterested in improving or expanding upon what could have been an incredible title. It's baffling that they haven’t even attempted to capitalize on the game's potential through paid DLC or meaningful updates—likely because doing so would require genuine effort.

Core gameplay elements are still missing, with glaring omissions like a functional diplomacy system. It’s frustrating to see such a promising game reduced to a yearly patch cycle that accomplishes little more than breaking mods, fixing minor issues, and occasionally adding something trivial like a new helmet. Considering the substantial revenue this game must have generated, one has to wonder: where did all that money go?

Mods are the only saving grace here. With the right mods, the game transforms into something that resembles a complete experience. That said, getting multiple mods to work together without constant crashes can be an exercise in patience. There’s talk of a 1.3 patch, but expectations are low, and unless the game is heavily discounted, it’s hard to recommend investing your time or money.

---{ Graphics }---
☐ You forget what reality is
☑ Beautiful
☐ Good
☐ Decent
☐ Bad
☐ Don‘t look too long at it
☐ MS-DOS

---{ Gameplay }---
☑ Very good
☐ Good
☐ It's just gameplay
☐ Mehh
☐ Watch paint dry instead
☐ Just don't

---{ Audio }---
☐ Eargasm
☐ Very good
☑ Good
☐ Not too bad
☐ Bad
☐ I'm now deaf

---{ Audience }---
☐ Kids
☑ Teens
☑ Adults
☐ Grandma

---{ PC Requirements }---
☐ Check if you can run paint
☐ Potato
☑ Decent
☐ Fast
☐ Rich boi
☐ Ask NASA if they have a spare computer

---{ Difficulty }---
☐ Just press 'W'
☐ Easy
☐ Easy to learn / Hard to master
☑ Significant brain usage
☐ Difficult
☐ Dark Souls

---{ Grind }---
☐ Nothing to grind
☐ Only if u care about leaderboards/ranks
☐ Isn't necessary to progress
☐ Average grind level
☑ Too much grind
☐ You'll need a second life for grinding

---{ Story }---
☐ No Story
☐ Some lore
☑ Average
☐ Good
☐ Lovely
☐ It'll replace your life

---{ Game Time }---
☐ Long enough for a cup of coffee
☐ Short
☐ Average
☐ Long
☑ To infinity and beyond

---{ Price }---
☐ It's free!
☐ Worth the price
☑ If it's on sale
☐ If u have some spare money left
☐ Not recommended
☐ You could also just burn your money

---{ Bugs }---
☐ Never heard of
☐ Minor bugs
☑ Can get annoying
☐ ARK: Survival Evolved
☐ The game itself is a big terrarium for bugs

---{ ? / 10 }---
☐ 1
☐ 2
☐ 3
☐ 4
☐ 5
☐ 6
☐ 7
☑ 8
☐ 9
☐ 10

There are bugs in this game that are literally making you unable to play it. One BSOD provoking GPU driver/shaders bug has been reported year ago and still hasn't been fixed yet. Game has great potential, but so what if I randomly cannot play it.

An improvement on Warband, with great new features, however it still lacks competent AI.

As soon as you amass an army to march out and take new settlements, your enemy starts attacking yours. You either waste most of your army defending yours (and repeat) or the enemy takes your settlement and you spend the next move retaking your own. Enemy lords constantly escaping from your prisons, even with the full tech level.

Only way to win this game is to kill lords, which destroys your reputation and makes it more difficult to raise armies.

The in-battle gameplay is still great though!

Sucks that online is basically dead, as it was one of the best parts of Warband.

Overall, I'm a huge fan of the game and the multiplayer combat, but the developers should be ashamed about some aspects of the game. I recently got into the modding tools and I'm beyond frustrated with the lack of even basic stability or functionality in the scene editor. The relatively frequent crashes are easy to work around by saving frequently. What isn't easy to work around is the entities will become bugged or corrupt and crash a scene without any debugging tool whatsoever to identify them (reliably) and replace them. To say nothing of the fact that you shouldn't have entities become bugged due to basic scale/duplicate/rotate/translate operations.

The scene editor's "Start mission as" tool has been broken for _three years_ and the developers haven't fixed it. This is while they've barely added any real SP content to the game in that same time period. This has been reported at least as early as 2021 on the forums and they've done nothing about it. I recently spent 40 hours making a map and I've been discussing it in depth on Discord with other scene makers, and reviewing forum posts and documentation. By intensive trial and error what I was able to determine is that the most complicated building I made in the center of the scene was bugged, but there's no way at all to identify which specific assets will crash the scene or which need to be replaced. Meaning I'd have to spend 5-8 hours at least rebuilding it if I cared to finish the scene. This is the tool the developers give us to provide other users free content to make the game more enjoyable. I only found out that the scene editor is this buggy after spending this much time in the editor, which is in some ways very limited in functionality (if you appreciate shortcuts similar to e.g. Blender you'll hate it).

Apparently entities can get bugged if you scale a parent object in a prefab, and there's no obvious warning about this. There's actually no documentation which describes which operations tend to lead to bugged entites either, you just have to waste hundreds of hours and suffer through it to figure that out yourself. I ran through and manually re-created every asset which was reported as bugged in the scene analyzer, which took me 3 hours. After this, the scene was still crashing upon load, and I was repeatedly deleting large sections, saving a new copy, and testing it to find out which sections of assets were bugging the scene. I was told, by other scene makers at this point that there can be hidden problems and basically there's no way for me to fix this scene except starting over on the largest part of it. The official documentation is very limited, even if you have the patience to read through all of it. The only way to actually figure out all the steps necessary to get a custom scene working is by watching youtube videos, reading docs will not get you very far.

I bought Bannerlord only for the multiplayer. For most buyers single player is the focus, and it's a situation where "mods will fix it." Just so you know, the developers provided a minimum of support to their modders. Did you know that, for the base maps in the game, if you load them into the scene editor 90% of them will have no terrain? People have been asking Taleworlds for years to simply upload those files onto a file sharing site so modders would have better access to recreate base maps in custom modules with changes. If really cared, it would easily take them less than a few hours to upload those files onto a file sharing map. Getting a better picture about these tools being so completely forgotten by the devs, when the reality is that a huge portion of the game's appeal depends on modders (especially for SP, which most people are on), is pretty outrageous.

I will happily remove this review if even half of the problems I'm mentioning are ever fixed. I would bet they're all still present in 4 years.

Waited my whole childhood for this shit only to be abandoned in a year. They break the game more and more with every patch and undo the hard work the modders who actually care about the game put in.

Now the game just flat out doesn't start after multiple installs and there is no where to get support, I also obviously can't get a refund so I guess I am just screwed.

This game has so much promise, but it was never actually finished.
Mod compatibility is awful, the community just gave up on the game altogether.
I stopped playing this game for a few months and after returning the game is objectively worse, not only that, but there is a bug that reports that the GPU failed to load items and the developers default to the graphic cards, when that is not the issue, this bug causes a CTD making the game unplayable, with or without mods, current version 1.2.12 still has it.
Troubleshooting does not work for me.
This game should've had a FINAL version LONG time ago and modders to pick from there, developers keep killing the game with new unrequested "fixes"
Considering the GPU-CTD bug, I cannot recommended this game at all.

Horribly optimized and lacklustre content output. Has it ever occurred to the devs to, you know, improve the game somewhat?

Almost no changes from alpha/beta stage. So much potential, but developers do nothing to improve the game.

Been out for over 2 years and very little in the way of content has been released the modding community is keeping this game alive, the devs have promised things they have well and truely failed to deliver on mostly now doing community events, its a real shame as the first game was heavily developed up until this one came out and it put this game to massive shame

This is not even half of what warband is. Just newer graphics and a few changes here and there while missing so much content. Overall downgrade without the modding community.

This is also abandoned in terms of updates.
Last update was June 2024, fixing bugs and crashes.
Last content/changes update was December 2023.

Fun, but not incredibly different from Warband. The new features such as the weapon crafting, new noble quests and garrison mechanics are cool but don't make much of an impact whether you choose to ignore them or not.

The mod scene is slowly starting to open up for this game, there's a handful of neat total conversions, but I don't think It will ever surpass the modding community for Warband, let alone the massive online community.

Still, as this game goes on deep sales quite often, I'd say It's worth a try when you're able to spare the time.

You will get some good hours out of this game but I can't in good faith recommend it. Calling it bare bones would be an insult to skeletons. The game is the exact same as it was on its first day of early access release. They expect mods to fix the game but make an update with a small bug fix that completely breaks most mods. If it wasn't for the devs reputation from warband this game would be considered a scam. It's shallow and underwhelming.

need something here because I can't just say "unsatisfied with an unfinished game." its like mount and blade 1, and about as half ass finished. it has got a lot working and a lot of good ideas, unfortunately the game is just broken as hell, often times unfair, hitboxes work when they feel like it, enemies seem to have a strange reach buff, and the economy is a mess. be lazy and hardly do anything in a battle? 200 coin a day. bust ass to forge or trade? you will NOT break even for hours and hours. I love these games but so frustrated with the Beta test stage it is still in years later.

Look I love this game, I love the design, the artwork, the story line. I have Just one problem, recently I have been having the most disgusting crashes I have every seen, It has made my monitar and pc completly shut down at times, I am simply curious when these crashes will be fixed. other than that the game is amazing I would recommend!

They abandoned it. It had SO much potential but they just rode the funding wave in pre release and then walked away from it after launching the 1.0 version. companies that do this should be blacklisted. HATE THIS CRAP

This could have easily been a mod for the first game. It doesn't deserve to be the second installment of a legendary game. I am saying this as someone who spent thousands of hours playing the first one, don't waste your time and money on this nonsense. If there will be a third one, I won't be buying it. Cause developers made their intentions quite obvious with this one. It sucks because with a right approach of developement, this could have been the best game ever made.

Do not mistake this as hate, This game is not bad, it's infact pretty good, especailly for a new player, The only problem is that it simply just lacks content, get established and afterwards the game starts getting boring. Warband in my honest opinion is better due to the fact that it has more content. Again, i must emphasize, this is not me calling bannerlord a bad game. Because it isn't.

Good game as intended by devs and fair successor of Warband, becomes amazing if start adding mods (long live modding communities!), huge experience if you join a multiplayer Clan.

Single player becomes kinda boring mid-late game but that's after 100 hours of trying to overcome that part of the game.
Multiplayer vanilla seems forgotten by devs, 3 maps for TDM after 4+ years guys???
Just to name a few problems...

Cons apart, the overall experience is very enjoyable; for battle hardend players that have 1000+ hours in-game it just leaves you with the feeling that some things are still missing to make it the game that it should be.
Let's enjoy what we have.

Concludo dicendo, sicuramente col tempo è diventato il mio gioco preferito, se vi piacciono le meccaniche trovatevi un clan e andate a spaccare un po' di teste il fine settimana; soprattutto, joinate Bretonnia.

AVANTI!

FINISH THE GAME! It's an awesome game I have to say, But it is not finished. Tons of gaps in the campaign, diplomacy is nonexistent, and it needs tons of work. This game is as vast as an ocean, but shallow as a puddle.

One of my favorite games of all time. Leading your giant squad/army into battle against overwhelming numbers just to crush them due to superior tactics and weaponry... ain't nothing like it. If you like medieval fighting, like "authentic" Medieval fighting, then you'll love this game. And if you would rather just be a trader running goods and stuff, you can do that too! Or what if you just wanna hunt down bandits? Then guess what???? Yeah, get this game!

Game showed promise in early access. After years of minor patches and tweaks, it still feels incomplete.

I can't say that i am all that happy with this game, i have about 30+ hours in it. I bought it during early access and i wished i didn't play the "waiting game" for updates. The single player is missing alot of life to it, and also has a pretty boring mid to end game loop. After a 10 hour campaign of upgrade settlement to max level, fight siege after siege, select meaningless policy. It just feels boring, no random events, random invasions, this game doesn't even have some of the same QOL features that Warband did. Multiplayer wise it was a mess whenever i played it (1 year ago), i don't know if it has improved. But it boggles my mind people like this game for what it is, maybe it'll get better with some DLC. But using the excuse "modders will fix it" is just giving the devs and excuse to do nothing to add content, i mean Warband was a good game on its own AND it had amazing mods.

I wanted to recommend this game so badly, especially with how much I love War band, but the truth is, it is simply unfinished. I played for hours and accepted the blandness of all of the characters, the unoriginal quest lines, and very repetitive game play in hopes that development would come far enough to fix these issues and provide what war band did just cleaner, better, and with some new fun additions.

However, as development patches get farther and farther apart it is clear now, that Tale worlds have given up on Banner lord, hoping people will just forget how unfinished it is. The quests are all generated from a handful of options, all of the NPCs have the exact same dialogue and no depth to them, relations and kingdom building have little to no effect on game play, and management of either a kingdom or the economy is an absolute grind (in the most boring of ways).

It seems as though everything that was great about war band has either been painfully over complicated, simplified to the degree in which it is pointless, or done away with entirely. If you liked war band you will like the combat and sieges here, but do not expect to get immersed in this game at all, it will feel early access and unfinished the whole time you play.