Man, not the way I thought I'd feel about this one. Not after Warband.

I'll try to keep it short because I'm not a game critic or reviewer, just a fan:
I've got quite a few hours into both Warband (331) and With Fire and Sword (37), so I do quite love the series, and even the weaker parts of it at that. I've sunk only slightly more than 1/7 the time into this that I have Warband and that's not for lack of trying. I was ecstatic when I heard the news and bought Bannerlord when it hit Steam on March 31st 2020. It was a title I was very much looking forward to playing for what I figured would be years to come, as M&B Warband is still one of my go-to time-sink games. The modding community has given a ridiculous longevity to Warband and I had hoped to see the same for Bannerlord.

And in the beginning, I loved Bannerlord. The majority of the 47 hours I have into this game were played within the first few months of Early Access. For two months or so I played it, and then I had to go back to work after the initial quarantine ended, and I would check back in every now and again, especially after every update or so to see what progress had been made. At first, it looked promising.

Then I'd check the next update and there was less happening still. Again, and again, and again. I would try to play it only to end up getting bored of it. I'd seen most of this before in Warband. Many of the updates were bug fixes, balance patches, but very little to keep me interested. Eventually I came to the conclusion that I'd just have to wait for some more content or a story, or a reason to play that wasn't aimless war-party wandering.

And so disappointingly, with the "full release" of Bannerlord now upon us, I still do not have that reason.

As it stands, Bannerlord isn't complete. There's no conclusion to the story, period. There's very little mid-game and no end game. The gameplay loop becomes VERY much a loop, and there is little to no diplomacy present in a game where royalty and lordship is the name of the game. A more appropriate name for the game, actually, may have been "Mount and Blade: Battle SImulator," because that's more less what this is.
Are the battles any good? Of course. If you liked Warband's combat or large scale battles with RTS elements, you'll love the combat here. The command mode during battles is something I particularly love about Bannerlord solely because it slows time and gives you some time to think. There are certainly things done right in this game, a lot of them, even better than Warband in a lot of cases.

Unfortunately, the game feels like "Warband-lite 2.0," with less overall features and a fresher coat of paint than Warband. It feels like for 10 years in development, something else was supposed to come out of it. It almost feels like TaleWorlds gave up, specifically in the context of calling this a "full release," and decided to employ the tried-and-true Bethesda strategy: let the community fill in the blanks.

Many promised features made it no where near the "full release," which is the reason I'm even writing this. I fail to see how a developer could call something a full release after it's been in Early Access for years and has changed so little. The bottom line and unfortunate reality is that this is the same game that we were playing when it first hit Steam, and it's more or less the same game as its predecessor that we've been playing for over a decade.

Oh, but as per the namesake of the game, you can finally carry banners into battle.