Mount and Blade Bannerlord (60/30$)
snake eyes
make me crys
Full disclosure, I have not beaten Mount and Blade: Bannerlord. I have logged over 60 hours of the game, and still feel like I’m just getting started. Mount and Blade Bannerlord is the third game in the franchise and the first release in over 10 years. It can best be described as a medieval battle simulator meets a tabletop RPG. The game sets itself apart by focusing on a physics based combat simulator and removing the fantasy from knights and castles. Yet, you will spend most of your time out of combat. Traveling from cities to villages plundering, politicking, and gathering butter for your army to eat. Battles typically only last a few minutes, but they offer enough action to satisfy your blade's lust for blood in an extremely satisfying way. I can not overstate how good it feels to fight in this game. You will develop such a lust with how satisfying it feels to make a connection with your bastard sword from atop your charging horse. It is not an easy game either. Making those moments of battle feel earned, as opposed to just button mashing in other games.
Instead of random attributes such as damage or durability, this game uses weight and top speed. You combine this speed with the speed of your horse and suddenly you are a one hit kill machine, that can not be stopped, until you are.. This focus on physics makes bad weapons and armour feel great, providing enjoyable gameplay the second you start. It is clear that the developers have spent the last ten years polishing this system to a T. With the refined combat mechanics comes a smarter and cunning AI. This was something lacking from the last entry into the series. When you are going head to head with an army of similar size, the enemy will wait for you to make the first move. They will split up their units from one another and devise flanking maneuvers. In fairness, there was a bit of this when facing large sized armys and highly skill lords in the old games. However, even simple caravans will no longer charge mindlessly into your much stronger force. It forces the player to think much more tactically than simply taking the high ground and letting your archers pick apart the armies around them. Bannerlord also features larger army sizes than its predecessors. The feeling of charging your 800 person army into another 800 person army is unlike any other game I have played. It feels like the famous battle of the bastards or the parlor fields, only you are leading the charge and fighting for your life.
The issues with the game mainly come from lackluster modernization. The graphics are a step up from Bannerlord, but nowhere comparable to other modern games. The systems and menus are better than the titles before it, but it still lacks simple quality of life features that would navigate the overworld annoying. Sieges still are not great. There is an odd defense and offense management system that is built around creating siege weapons to either defend your city or plunder it. Yet, the defender's weapons work solely in the overworld, and not in the simulation. The attackers weapons are a requirement to take a castle in the combat simulator.. The result is that sieges can take even longer now, and still don’t feel nearly as good as open field combat. It’s a step up, and the game is still in early access, but it is disheartening to spend an hour trying to siege a castle without even getting into the simulation portion of the fight.
The game is also brutal to losers. When you lose a fight you will lose 100% of your army that you have spent the last few hours training. Luckily Bannerlod makes it easier to resemble a skill force, but it is still enough of a punishment to make you consider every move. You will be forced to start from square one from time to time. That is when you will stop playing this game. But the next time you log on you realize that your square one has moved up since you first began, and soon you have another force ready to conquer the land. Which is basically impossible to do. I have spent 60 hours and I barely have a kingdom to call my own. It is an endless game with a one time fee and the promise of an active developer and a thriving mod community. This game is fun right now, but when people begin to create mods with better features and in the worlds of popular series like Game of Thrones or Lord of the Rings, then this game will be worth its weight in gold (60/30$).
