Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord

An improvement on Warband in every possible way.

There is no other game like Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord. It's a fantastic experience, one unique in the gaming space. The constant grind to manage and progress with your kingdom is hard work - really hard work - but the payoff is spectacular. This is not a game for everyone but if this is your kind of thing, you're going to love every blood-stained minute of it.

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 understanding its finer points, but keep hammering away and you will find them.

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 really dig into it. Especially for an early access game, it’s ambitious and reasonably well-polished, even if it still has a long way to go. And with the huge graphical and general usability improvements, a latter-day rehash of Warband – one of my favorite games of the last decade – isn’t even a bad thing by itself when you get right down to it.

Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord is an intricate feudal relationship simulator set in a dynamic sandbox world dominated by six medieval kingdoms roughly analogous to cultures from our own. It features massive-scale battles, deep character customisation, action-based melee and ranged combat (on horseback or afoot), a living, breathing economy, and a sense of progression so powerful it can be hard to put down. Translation: imagine the Machiavellian interpersonal toy box of Crusader Kings combined with the crunchy combat from Chivalry, with battles on a Total War scale, underpinned by Skyrim's RPG me...

Despite a fun gameplay loop, I have a few frustrations with Bannerlord. Namely, the UI on console isn’t all too intuitive on a controller. As a PC first game, that’s not all too surprising and there is mouse and keyboard support for those interested. With this final release I haven’t run into any big bugs (although tactics and sieges don’t fair too well), but I have had my fair share of crashes and, in turn, lost a good chunk of progress. And lastly, end game hasn’t really got much to do once you have your kingdom set up. At times I really felt like I was playing a higher definition, more stre...

Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord comes back with improvements to everything we liked about the previous games and some new systems as well. However, it's not a perfectly polished game, so you'll have to navigate a few edges on your path to restore/destroy the Empire.

My return to Calradia wasn’t entirely jubilant, though Mount & Blade 2 Bannerlord is a game I’ll likely stick with, simply due to my love of the original. A wealth of new systems and activities help this sandbox strategy sim feel more alive than ever, though the busywork required to get anywhere can feel like a grind. Overall, existing fans will rejoice while newcomers may look on unimpressed, unsure what all the fuss is about.