Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord Review - Page 5
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Article Index
The mod then completely overhauls this system and allows your garrisons to recruit and train new men in your absence. It lets you tinker with the specifics of this process, and even create a template listing specific units you want to be trained. The garrison then will create a recruiting party that will visit the nearby villages. And once you have some battle-ready troops, your garrisons will be able to create guards that protect your lands from raiders.
This is pretty much what I expected all of the game's systems to look like following the early access phase. Instead, we got some sidegrades at best and even managed to lose some features.
And as for multiplayer, it was showing quite a bit of promise during early access, especially the Captain mode where every player commands a squad of AI soldiers and fights over various objectives.
The release version of the game's multiplayer side greets you with a fancy menu with various cosmetic and progression options, and several ways to play the game.
But after clicking on matchmaking and waiting several minutes, I got into a game with one other guy in what was supposed to be a 6v6 match. I was then informed that skirmish was currently bugged and people mostly played on custom servers these days. Most of those were fairly barren, with only a few having any action going. And since after quitting that first empty skirmish game I got locked out of matchmaking for a bit, I just gave up on the whole thing.
Technical Information
Bannerlord's early access release was met with some grumbling about bugs and crashes. And while I encountered plenty of the former, the latter were extremely rare for me. To the game's credit, the full release had no crashes at all and bugs were far less prevalent.
There were still some, mostly visual glitches like the ground flashing in some desert scenes or certain rocks not having any collision. Then, the later stages of the campaign have you fighting these unique conspiracy units and once you beat them you get the prisoner screen, but you can't take them as prisoners. And during sieges, it feels like enemies can just fall through the textures on occasion, leaving your army standing around while a lone unreachable enemy exists somewhere. I also got several error messages every time I quit the game.
Another rather amusing glitch that reflects the game as a whole is the fact that the workshops you can own in the game have levels, but there's no way to level them up.
Other than that, all the points from the early access review still stand - the game looks and sounds great, especially compared to its predecessors. And it runs pretty well considering how many objects you can have on the screen.
Conclusion
If I were to sum up this whole review in one word, it would be "disappointed." You can play the Hercules gif/video yourself.
At the end of the day, this is still Mount & Blade. It's still very fun to ride around the map, get into fights and gradually paint the map green. But with how ambitious Bannerlord looked at the start and how long it took for it to get here, I expected more.
From the looks of it, the developers intend to keep working on the game now that it's released, and hopefully, this will eventually allow the game to realize its full potential. But at this point, over a decade after the original announcement, I wouldn't hold my breath. Let's just hope we get some fun mods at some point.
