Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord Review (Xbox One)

STAFF REVIEW of Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord (Xbox One)

Friday, December 23, 2022.
by Ayden Heilman

Mount And Blade 2 Bannerlord is the awaited sequel to the first game, finally ported to Xbox One and the Xbox Series X|S with simple but well-adapted controls for the controllers, using a cursor most of the time to navigate the menus. Bannerlord puts you back into its original map, Calradia, set hundreds of years before the first game, and the Continent is split into eight different factions: The Western, Southern, Northern Empire, Velandia, Aserai, Battania, Khuzait and Sturgia.

Starting off, there is a large assortment of choices affecting how your character begins, like if your family was nobles or peasants, and what your character did when he was growing up. These choices start you with different perks and skills leveled up more. There are also perks and skills for certain playstyles like a brute barbarian or a diplomat who tries to avoid fighting at all costs. The skills are put into six different categories: Vigor, Control, Endurance, Cunning, Social and Intelligence.

All those categories have skills for each type of player; the trader, noble, or warrior, like Engineering to build a siege camp, or Stewardship which help you run your town. Then it throws you into a barebones tutorial which teaches the basics of combat and not much else. For how deep this game goes, the tutorial should have been more in-depth going into more of the mechanics. Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord offers you the choice of a story or a sandbox, the only difference from these two was the hands off thin storyline the campaign offers.

Bannerlord isn't about a solo hero magically being better than everyone; you'll be constantly recruiting new people, moving them up the ranks and replacing them when they die. The majority of the battles that you will be getting into will consist of you controlling the army you have been building up. These armies or groups you make allow you to choose what class each person will be, varying from spear throwing, javelins or shields and axes. Whatever kingdom they are from will determine their fighting styles.

The overall happiness of the group affects how determined and their overall skill in fighting situations. Their happiness derives from many factors including how much food you can provide to them, and the more people you are commanding the more food you’ll need. Personal events like getting married, having a child or losing a loved one can affect certain soldiers too. The various aforementioned factions all have different tactics that they will utilize, like the Khuzait which are horse oriented fighters using bows, or the Huns and Arsai which in the game counterpart to the medieval Egyptians whom also use horses but they have great infantry skills.

You can grow your army's numbers by going to fiefs or major cities and recruiting farmers or mercenaries. Obviously the farmers would require more battle and training to level up. Fights can happen in fields swapping you from the 2D top-down map system you use to navigate, swapping to third person combat. The combat resembles that of Chivalry 2 but doesn't quite hit the mark as well. The combat was often quite too simplistic and unpolished. During fights where both me and my opponent were on horses I found us going circles for a bit, not being able to hit each other. Although it was not the best feature it was adequate, but if you want to avoid fighting yourself you can command your soldiers, just be careful because sometimes they cluster up on certain commands.

Battles can get pretty large, especially during the sieges which finds multiples armies of one faction attacking either a city or castle, causing a lot of bodies and loot that you will get a cut of if your a part of the attacking army and helped with the siege from the beginning. These fights are fought with at least 100 people on each side fighting one another. After there is a hole on either side’s army count, reinforcements will come in and this process will continue until one side retreats or all die. Although during sieges I found everyone mostly got clustered on the castle walls and it sometimes drew the sieges lengths out sometimes. But if you don't want to do any fighting you can send troops which simulate the fight and give the results at the end of the fight.

The fields you fight in do not vary much but the cities and terrain of the map do differ from each other. These biomes range from plains, forests, to tall mountainous ranges and deserts. Each biome has cities that fit the environment around them and they are built really well, but there is not much reason to walk around the city when you can do almost all of the things you need to do inside the menus. There were only a few times where I found myself having to go into cities when I was buying a business or doing a mission.

All the factions compete and sometimes ally to take down a common foe. Unlike the first game, when you're building up your clan from the ground up you can be a part of a Kingdom, and if you have enough influence in said Kingdom you spend the influence points on voting for or against both domestic and state laws. You can also run fiefs and major cities, but getting these can be a struggle. You would either have to marry a politically powerful person or score a fief or town in the midst of a war. Running one takes skill on both the characters and players side. You also have to make sure there are guards to prevent attacks and invest money into them occasionally to help keep the economy of the town afloat. Doing that can be hard to find out, yet alone learn. There are a lot more examples of this where there is game changing mechanics but they are buried deep in menus. Again, having a more in-depth tutorial that fleshed the game out more would be a blessing for this game.

You can gain money and power in many ways, like working under the name of another Kingdom or building up your own from the ground. To build your own you can raid villages for supplies and pillage them for even more, but pillaging often attracts armies in the same hold to fight you. After pillaging or robbing villages you can often get prisoners which you can ransom in major city taverns. There's also sidequests in towns and cities that you can do for money. After gaining enough soldiers and money you can siege cities or castles, and if successful, you will have a town or castle to fund and protect but also get monthly profits from it. If you gain control of a city you will have control over all the fiefs in that cities hold.

The audio is nothing special with a lot of repeating war cries between fighting armies, but the music and audio cues for certain actions that happen occasionally are memorable and the graphics are generally good except the infrequent glitch that causes gaps in armors clipping on certain armor pieces.

Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord feels excellent in most cases, like whacking someone off their horse with a spear, or getting that perfect hit on an enemy in battles. The map is far more varied from the first game and they improved on a lot of mechanics in this sequel as well. Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord was shallow in some ways, and sometimes has annoyingly hidden game mechanics, but kept me coming back for how unique it felt from its freedom of choice.

**Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord was provided by the publisher and reviewed on an Xbox Series S**

Overall: 7.5 / 10
Gameplay: 8.5 / 10
Visuals: 6.5 / 10
Sound: 6.5 / 10

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STAFF REVIEW of Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord (Xbox One)

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