Recent reviews by Naki

v1.0.1 Somewhat Thorough Review

Bannerlord as of its current iteration is great game riddled with bugs, horrible optimization and bad design choices.
So far though, I have a love-hate relationship with this game because of that.


The combat system involving directional blocking is easy for beginners to learn and is one of my favorite features in the mount and blade series. I'm glad that this is still more or less retained in Bannerlord. However, the game lacks auto-block for causals(which I'm sure would be added back due to popular demand). This combined with the new leveling system where everyone, whether you're a peasant or a veteran soldier, swings their weapons at the same speed, vastly increases increases the difficulty of the game. Combine this fact with archers, even peasant archers can headshot me from a mile away.


In Warband, weapon proficiency dictated how much damage you deal and how fast you swung or shot your weapons. In Bannerlord, This was thrown out of the window with everyone getting the same level of proficiency. This means that an arrow to an unarmored looters head will not kill the person instantly or as said before looters can have a melee proficiency as good as your veteran soldiers.

Leveling skills is done through grinding now rather than skillpoints. Instead of skill points when you level up, you get focus points. When these are applied to a skill. It adds a multiplier to the xp gained in that skill. Currently however, the xp gain of skills are unbalanced. Some skills get a ridiculous amount of xp while some skills are hard to raise up.

What also changed are perks. You get a perk every time you reach a certain level of skill. For example, at riding 50, you can choose from two perks that either give you an extra 2+ arrows or extra 2+ throwables when riding on horseback. It's a decent system and I like the change. However, the game somehow caps your character level at lvl 10. I don't know why but it keeps me from accessing the rest of the perks in the skill tree which is really sad.

The battles are amazing...for 20 seconds. That's how fast 100v100 battles considering they have a more refined morale system in place. However, when armies of 500v500 clash, this is where Bannerlord truly shines. Words can't describe how much euphoria I feel when these battle happen. The same F1,F2,F3 command system still remains in Bannerlord with lots of improvements as well. They removed the tactical map which is a minor minus, but you can still see where the enemies are because they added icons when holding alt showing where the enemy is.

Battle AI is a hit-or-miss, I was part of an army and the friendly commander was able to give decently smart commands. But sometimes, the AI will just charge at you sacrificing all their men. Siege AI is where its the worst, especially ladder sieges. My guys just get stuck on the ladders and get killed. Better to auto-resolve, you lose less men.

The campaign is where Bannerlord starts to show its incompleteness. First of all, you can't start a kingdom at the moment, you can only join one. Due to bad campaign AI and many other factors, one faction will completely snowball across the map. This happens before you even reach lvl 10. So once your strong enough to even be a threat, you have to contend with that monster of a faction with 8000 men strength (at game start, most factions start with 4000).

The early game is tedious, only way you can make money are quests, tourneys, looter hunting and manual trading. Combine that with boring and repetitive quests. The game really starts once you have a workshop since it can start supporting your army.

As said before, campaign AI is really bad. Unlike Warband, the AI doesn't cheat and will go around and recruit soldiers and also manage their own supplies. Problem is they don't know how to manage their supplies. So you often see armies walking around recruiting men but also lots of men deserting because of starvation. You don't know how many times I've seen the leader of a faction captured by looters just because of this issue. Sieges are also affected when besieging armies lose tons of troops due to starvation.

Being a mercenary is a joke, In Warband, the kingdom gives you weekly stipend that can somewhat support your army. In Bannerlord, they give you a measly sum ranging from 10 to 40 denars for each party destroyed. It does not matter if there are 10 looters or the king's 100 man elite army, they'll give you pennies for your service. And if you leave the faction, you get a big relation penalty with everyone in that faction, which honestly doesn't make any sense. In fact, you might as well be a vassal since you gain more income that way.

Playing as a merchant is more or less the same as Warband. Which is totally fine since the trading system is decent enough. Caravans earn a good amount of income as well for their investment.


Music is godlike.


The tutorial is barebones and teaches you nothing. If I wasn't a Warband veteran, I would have been confused as hell. Luckily, the combat system is easy to understand. But the rest not so much. I had to read up on the internet about a great many things. I didn't even knew that workshops existed till I read about it in a review.

As expected of an early access game, there are a lot of bugs and require more optimization. This game is very CPU-heavy and even with my i7 5820k and my GTX 1080, it still stutters from time to time. I think there is a memory leak the more you play making the late game unplayable.

Also this game is a loading screen simulator, if you're going to get this game, buy an ssd, you will need it.

Why do bandit hideouts have their own section? Because if there is one thing I hate about Bannerlord, its the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ bandit hideouts. This abomination of a feature was carried over from Warband and I wonder why the devs even considered adding this ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. Here's how it works. You randomly take six men from your army, doesn't matter if its a ♥♥♥♥♥♥ peasant or your ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ Royal guard or something. Then you raid the bandit encampment ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ up groups of bandits at a time. And there are 40 of them ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ in the camp, so good luck trying to kill those ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. And if you die, you lose your entire army of ♥♥♥♥-worshiping elite followers that you gained from recruiting and training. And you will die, a lot. Imagine losing all your ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ progress just because your elite soldiers are in fact a bunch of ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ and just surrendered cause they suddenly don't know how to fight.

Its ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ ♥♥♥♥♥♥ right? So I decided I want to avoid hideouts like the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ Corona virus. But guess what? You have to ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ attack two hideouts in the main questline. Makes me want to die honestly.


Why did I recommend this game despite the seemingly negative description I gave of the game?

Its quite simple really.

It's because I'm a blind fanboy.

Other than that, I feel that TaleWorld managed to get most aspects of the game right; Making Bannerlord a Mount and Blade game rather than anything else. If I remember correctly, Warband was a early access title as well that went on to become a Steam top seller and is touted as one of examples of early access done right. Therefore, I have high hopes that TaleWorld will continue to patch the game up ( They even do 1 patch a day which is awesome) and make Bannerlord an absolutely fantastic game.

Thus, If you want to buy this game I would buy it to be a beta tester and to support TaleWorlds. I rate Bannerlord at its current state 6.5/10.

Minor Nitpicks
-For a game about being a Bannerlord, there is a surprising scarcity of banners in battle mode.
-Why is every character so ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ ugly lmao.

Thouroughly enjoyed stacking all my soldiers in a building and blowing them up with my Goliaths