Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord Review Summary

Exciting battles: Players enjoy the large-scale battles, which are described as awesome, epic, and exciting. The combat system is a highlight, offering satisfying and immersive experiences.

Mods enhance gameplay: The modding community significantly improves the game experience by adding new content and enhancing gameplay mechanics. Players find that mods make the game more enjoyable and addictive.

Positive gameplay experience: Players consistently praise the game for its engaging and enjoyable gameplay, describing it as fun, excellent, and highly addictive. Many players recommend the game and find it entertaining and spectacular.

Freedom in gameplay: The game offers a high degree of freedom and flexibility in gameplay, allowing players to choose different roles and strategies. This sandbox gameplay is praised for its realism and immersion.

Rich and detailed world: The game features a vast and detailed world with a variety of activities and interactions. Players appreciate the depth added by new features like birth and death mechanics.

Modding Issues: Players report various issues with mods, including difficulties in installation, compatibility problems, and mods breaking with frequent updates. The game heavily relies on mods to enhance the experience, but mod support is weak.

Repetitive Gameplay: Many players find that the game becomes repetitive and boring, especially in the late stages. The gameplay loop can feel monotonous and dull after the initial excitement wears off.

Basic Diplomacy System: The diplomacy system in the game is often described as extremely basic, simplistic, and lacking depth. Players feel that it needs significant improvement to be more engaging and effective.

AI Behavior Problems: The AI behavior in the game is often criticized for being unintelligent and inconsistent. NPCs and AI in battles exhibit flawed and unrealistic behavior, detracting from the gameplay experience.

Frequent Crashes: The game is plagued by frequent crashes and bugs, which can be very frustrating for players. These crashes often occur after updates and can disrupt the gaming experience significantly.

Battle mechanics and strategies: The game features engaging and realistic battle mechanics, including sea battles, naval combat, and battle commands. Players can use various battle strategies and tactics.

Diverse gameplay activities: The game offers a variety of activities including trade, economy management, city management, and first-person combat. Players can engage in different professions like blacksmithing and participate in large-scale battles with various units and formations.

Kingdom and clan management: Players can manage fiefs, kingdoms, clans, castles, and towns. The game involves serving different kingdoms or creating and running your own, combining strategy with roleplaying and trade simulations.

Diplomacy and political systems: The game features a diplomacy system that includes AI diplomacy, political management, and internal politics. Players can engage in diplomatic features and manage trade systems.

Multiplayer and co-op modes: The game offers various multiplayer modes including co-op, singleplayer, cooperative campaign, and multiplayer PvE content. Players can engage in multiplayer battles and cooperative gameplay.

Frequent game crashes: The game experiences frequent crashes, particularly after updates, with mods, and during various actions such as walking or giving orders to troops. This issue is widespread and significantly impacts gameplay.

Performance and optimization issues: Players report unoptimized performance, poor optimization, and performance issues. These problems manifest as FPS drops, high system requirements, and significant declines in performance during gameplay.

Loading screen problems: The game has issues related to loading screens, including freezing during loading, long load times, and infinite loading screens. These problems disrupt the gaming experience and cause frustration.

Stability issues in battles: Players encounter stability issues, particularly during battles. These issues include instability in battles, freezing in large battles, and crashes during gameplay.

Graphical and visual bugs: There are various graphical bugs reported, such as graphical bugs during sieges, ambient occlusion problems, and issues with character scene modeling textures. These bugs affect the visual quality of the game.

Suggested gameplay improvements: Players suggest various improvements such as automatic development options for characters, enhancing city growth mechanics, managing multiple characters, improving visual feedback for city development, and enhancing military ranks and soldier progression.

Avoid purchase until fixes: Multiple reviews suggest not buying the game until significant issues are addressed.

Recommended for genre fans: The game is highly recommended for fans of medieval role-playing games, strategies, and similar franchises like Total War, Crusader Kings, or Skyrim.

Conditional recommendations: The game is recommended but with reservations due to its current issues and shortcomings.

Recommended DLC and mods: Reviews recommend the base game and specific DLCs like War Sails, as well as various mods for an enhanced experience.

Community fair range: $17.00 - $25.00.

Game completion: 2000.0h.

Story completion: 70.0h.

Session length: 5.0h.

Players generally enjoy the combat and progression systems, but the game can become repetitive and boring without mods. The fun starts when building a clan and kingdom, but issues like lack of diplomacy and repetitive gameplay can lead to frustration.

Reported time to anchor: 3h.

Friction: Lack of diplomacy; Repetitive gameplay; Constant wars; Boring late game.

History Buff Strategist: Enjoys managing troops, politics, and engaging in historically immersive gameplay. Motivation: Historical immersion and strategic depth. Stance: buy.

Casual Battle Enthusiast: Enjoys being part of battles and commanding armies in a casual setting. Motivation: Enjoyment of battles and casual gameplay. Stance: sale.

Critical Balancer: Critically evaluates game balance and mechanics, often suggesting improvements. Motivation: Seeking a balanced and fair gameplay experience. Stance: deep sale.

Performance varies significantly across hardware cohorts, with lower VRAM/RAM configurations generally reporting better experiences. Higher-end hardware often reports crashes and instability, particularly with mods or during large battles.

Windows <8GB VRAM / <16GB RAM: positive. Most users report smooth performance and good optimization, even on older or lower-end hardware.

Windows <8GB VRAM / 16-31GB RAM: mixed. Users experience occasional crashes and FPS drops, particularly during large battles, but overall performance is decent.

Windows 12-15GB VRAM: negative. Frequent crashes and performance issues are reported, even without mods.

Steam Deck: The Steam Deck experience for this game is marred by frequent crashes, UI and text issues, performance problems, game launch difficulties, and poor optimization. These issues significantly impact the user experience, making the game difficult to play and enjoy.

Linux and Proton: Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord exhibits significant issues on Linux, including frequent crashes, severe performance problems, and overall poor playability. These issues are highlighted by multiple users, indicating a problematic experience for Linux gamers.

Monetization: The analysis of user reviews reveals significant dissatisfaction with the game's DLC practices. Key issues include the perceived low quality and high cost of DLCs, the cutting of content from the base game to sell as DLC, and the lack of support for community mods. Additionally, the pricing strategy for DLCs is seen as exploitative, and the integration of DLC content is poorly executed, requiring substantial time investment and often being buggy. These factors contribute to a negative perception of the game's monetization practices.

Mod reliance: The game heavily relies on community mods for stability, essential features, and overall playability. Many users report that the base game is unplayable without mods, and developers are seen to depend on the modding community for fixes and improvements. Specific mods are frequently mentioned as necessary for a stable and enhanced gaming experience.

External guides: The primary issues highlighted by users revolve around the inaccuracy of spatial data in the in-game encyclopedia, the lack of comprehensive instructional data, and the need for external resources to understand game mechanics and progression. These issues significantly impact the user experience, making navigation and learning the game's systems challenging.