Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord Review: Patience Is Rewarded

Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord eventually gets really good. After putting dozens of hours into building your army, taking control of areas, and cutting down anyone who stands against you, you’ll find thrilling large-scale strategy battles that few games can even hope to match. Getting to that point, however, takes a long time and requires hours of repetitive grinding which simply isn’t enjoyable. It makes for an experience that is hard to fully recommend to most players.

An Early Push

For the first time in a Mount & Blade game, you have an actual campaign with story goals that start off with you trying to put your family back together and end up involving some artifacts you’re meant to recover. While I appreciate that the setup of this provides a tutorial which gets you familiar with a variety of the weapons involved and gives you some direction in the early going, in truth, this isn’t the reason to play. It’s a shallow story without interesting characters. Treat it as a tutorial before moving into the core game.

That core game is far more interesting. A sandbox at heart, like the rest of the Mount & Blade series, you’re basically trying to conquer everything you see before you. With a mixture of strategy gameplay, RPG elements, and even action combat, there really is nothing quite like this series, and Bannerlord definitely still feels like a Mount & Blade game. Your created character is left at the end of the tutorial with only a vague goal and little in the way of resources, so you’ll have to work your way up from the bottom.

In the early hours, that means going to villages, recruiting the troops you can, and taking on odd jobs to have the money to pay those troops and keep them happy. These early quests aren’t interesting and are one of the things most holding Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord back from wide appeal. It can take a long time to build your resources and your army up to the point where you feel like you can fully engage with things in the way you’ll want to.

Strategy Wins The Day

Once you get there, though, things do take a turn with massive-scale battles between you and competing armies. You’ll command your troops and manage their actions on the fly, with the right strategic moves being necessary for victory. While in the early game, you can mostly just run over rebels if you have the numbers, once you start getting into it with larger armies, these battles can be positively thrilling and require a lot of quick thinking.

You’ll be part of the combat as well, able to directly engage your foes. This matters a lot more in smaller-scale battles, simply because you’re only one person, but the combat itself is interesting, even if it takes some getting used to. A wide variety of weapons allows you to find the right option for you, and positioning is everything, as blocking and attacking from different angles allows you to get around shields, repel enemy blows, and keep your character winning. You’re no god on the battlefield here, easily able to be taken out, though what impacts that will have depend on just one of the rather huge list of settings you can customize.

Choose Carefully

Few games can match the emergent gameplay on display in Bannerlord, either. Proper planning is crucial because a few wrong decisions can lead to drastic changes in your situation. Your choices have real consequences here. An army can easily be wiped out, leading you to have to start over in building it again. Make a village mad, and your options to deal with them can be severely limited. Rivalries and factions make a huge difference in how various NPCs will interact with you. While some of these situations can send you back into the early game grind if you plan badly enough, I mostly appreciated that I was writing my own story, mistakes, and all.

With how much the world shapes itself based on your actions, though, I wished the world of Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord had more personality. Villages all feel the same. I never met a character in my entire time with the game who felt particularly interesting or well-written. Stiff animations and basic dialogue make it clear that inhabiting a world that feels fully lived in was not a priority here.

Which is a shame, because I’d care a lot more about conquering a world filled with people I liked and places that felt interesting to add to my growing Empire. With how things shift and move, it feels like they were already halfway there, but the parts of Bannerlord that seemed to most interest the developers and the parts that interested me didn’t overlap as often as I’d like. Playing with others can help to alleviate this, if only because your fellow players bring themselves to the game and are more interesting to interact with than the mostly one-dimensional AI, but they’re not a full solution to the issues here.

Conclusion

I’ve never been a big fan of games that require you to invest huge amounts of time before they get good. Our time is valuable and while Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord does eventually get good, the uninteresting grind along the way and lifeless world didn’t do much to pull me back. Fans of the series will still have a great time and if you are willing to invest your time you’ll definitely be rewarded for it, but its frustrating to see so much potential for an even better game left unrealized.

Final Verdict: 3.5/5

Available on: PC (Reviewed), PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One; Publisher: TaleWorlds Entertainment; Developer: TaleWorlds Entertainment; Players: 64; Released: October 25th, 2022; ESRB: M for Mature; MSRP: $49.99

Full disclosure: This review is based on a copy of Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord provided by the publisher.