After 8 years, Bannerlord finally hit the scene just in time to placate us during lockdown. Taleworlds even dropped the price by 10-20%, and pushed it a day early.
Overall, I am extremely pleased with the game. Mainly because Taleworlds has created a new engine, retained the spirit of the original, and may do more for the modding scene than any game in recent history, or even history in general. Coded in .net C#, Bannerlord is perfectly capable of running at 1440K with 1,000 troops onscreen on an i7-8700K with a GTX 1070 card. This alone is an achievement in my book.
Battles are significantly improved over warband. while much work remains to tighten up sieges, and clean up some odd ai command behaviour, as well as tweaks to troop spacing, in general the battles are much more realistic and challenging. Your more a general than a 1 man army, and careful timing and placement of yourself and your troops is vital.
1v1 combat is great, although currently a circle strafing flaw seems to exist that makes it quiet easy to beat the ai. Outside of this, combat feels excellent. Spears are much more viable than in warband already, and useful against cavalry.
The general interface is vastly improved, though deficiencies remain such as the remaining troop/party interface from warband. This makes managing your troops really crazy, as no totals are shown, and no method to sort troops exists, nor to group them into faction trees or class trees. This interface is very likely my biggest gripe with the game as I do feel Taleworlds should have redesigned this as part of the original Bannerlord mandate and seems to me a glaring oversight.
Kingdom management is also great, and many features everywhere just need some tweaks in how data is displayed to the player, how critical events are notified, etc. Stuff like the log are harder to find, I still havent figured out how to pull up the event log. Go To settlemenet is also missing.
But the gameplay is great. running around the map, slaying lords, besieging castles, all works extremely well.
Every missing feature is already being addressed by modders, and I expect Taleworlds will look over the top 10-20 mods and integrate the features sets directly into bannerlord. This again shows the brilliance of the game engine design, as modders have already created party sorting mods, ways to tweaks settings through in menu/game sliders, etc.
Likewise, stories/quests are very barebones right now, especially the main story and deeper quests.
Taleworlds has already dropped 8+ patches, and are really showing up other indie dev studios in their ability to perform.
What does this mean? Good news, really, as everything I deem missing and deficient outside a few minor gripes is readily fixable by Taleworlds & modders, as is already proven. I expect Bannerlord will spawn a vast following, and we will see game mods and a finished product that will more than justify the $60 expensive for a one time purchase. You will likely get years of enjoyment from this game if living the medieval life is your thing.
Multiplayer review will follow next month.