After a long time in early access, Mount & Blade 2 Bannerlord arrived in full version at the end of 2022. This medieval sandbox puts us in the shoes of a nobody and offers us a whole world to face, following the path we believe more appropriate.
Such a free approach has its ups and downs, just like the game itself, which fights from different points of view, but it's usually quite fun, as long as you have the ability and patience to deal with it.
Disponible para PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One y Xbox Series TaleWorlds Entertainment It improves what was achieved with the first chapter and offers dozens and dozens of hours of gameplay in single and multiplayer mode.
Let's see the details in ours. Mount & Blade 2 Bannerlord Review.
Start from the bottom
Mount & Blade 2 Bannerlord wants to do that become kings and queens, commanders of kingdoms with vassals and entire armies at our command. However, before we get there, we will have to start from the bottom and learn to exploit the numerous mechanics available, although sometimes not particularly layered.
The adventure, after a somewhat brief tutorial, leaves us alone with a handful of money and a generic plot mission. narratively, Mount & Blade 2 Bannerlord is nothing amazing. Don't expect an epic quest with deep, elaborate characters. The NPCs are empty dolls and the game texts are repetitive, a price to pay for having a huge map full of cities, towns and missions to tackle at any time, at the service of the evolution of our character.
We can immediately go in all directions and explore each region, but we will not have the means to do so. The first step is to spend the money to form a band of mercenaries and thus not run the risk of being assaulted by each group of bandits. Therefore, once you have strength in numbers, you will pay the assassins in their own currency and gain some loot and maybe some prisoners. Moving from one town to another, within the 2D world map, we can talk to a series of merchants and nobles in the area, in need of help.
At this point the "grinding", that is, a constant repetition of small tasks necessary to earn resources or even just keep our purse inflated to ensure we can pay our group of soldiers.
The scale on which we are going to act will gradually expand. By forming close alliances with kingdoms we can become vassals, managing a castle and some villages. We'll go to far war, we will manage (or rather activate, since there is little to manage) trade routes or give control of specific parts of the game to companions that we have recruited.
A certain part of Mount & Blade 2 Bannerlord can be handled without getting too involved and it is both good and bad. That's bad because it's never particularly deep and the management options don't give us much control. It's good because we will have more time to go to war.
We fight
One of the most relevant and characteristic elements of Mount & Blade 2 is Bannerlord the more action side. The sandbox is based mainly on confrontations between groups of soldiers to determine who has control over a certain area or simply to ensure that we obtain resources and loot, including food and equipment for our character.
Battles are a mix between real-time action and strategy. We will have our character, who will lead his soldiers, but apart from a little more intelligence we will not have much else in our favor. Even with good skills, good equipment, and even after mastering the one-on-one combat system, in the middle of the fray we will be as good as anyone in front of us.
Our character can fall very easily, but on basic difficulty that does not mean that the game is over: our soldiers will be able to win for us and after the battle we will be able to recover our health. The real task is give orders to the troops, defining formations, movements and other actions. This is not an easy task and will take you several hours to even master if you are not already used to this type of mechanics. The battlefield, however, can provide satisfaction in the later stages of the game, between pitched battles and sieges. In both the offline campaign and online battles, you can use your attack and retreat strategies to gain the advantage.
For fight first hand However, perhaps by choosing the right moment, you will have to get used to a four-way attack system, which allows you to attack and parry with a simple movement of the mouse and a click. In duels it may seem like a precise art, but most of the time it will be pure metal-on-metal chaos.
A proper Middle Ages
The beauty of Mount & Blade 2 Bannerlord also lies in the atmosphere, in this medieval world Spacious and full of environments. In fact, each town can be explored on foot or on horseback and the wide open spaces of the battlefields vary by region, which also has tactical implications.
Unfortunately there are some technical limits and also structural. Although it is initially nice to take a tour of the city, we very quickly realize that it is not entirely necessary and, in fact, it is much better to use the menus to speak directly with the various notable figures in the area. Completely avoiding exploring 3D maps, saving time within an already long campaign.
This also eliminates the hassle of having to move around environments. technically not great. Even in this case, we are faced with the price paid for the magnitude of this work. You can't create dozens of towns, cities and castles by paying attention to every detail.
Finally, the dubbing is mediocre and does not stand out, while the soundtrack gladly accompanies us throughout the adventure. The voices are in English, but the text is translated into Spanish, which is very welcome given that the game is predominantly text-based.
Conclusions
Tested version PC with Windows digital delivery Steam Price 49,99 € Holygamerz.com 8.0 Readers (37) 8.2 your voteMount & Blade 2 Bannerlord is not an easy game to understand and several of its mechanics are not presented very clearly. There's also a lot of repetition, across multiple levels of the game, between side quests and repeated events. At the same time, however, it gives us access to a great sandbox, which immerses us in a globally believable medieval world and allows us to transform from a simple rural mercenary to a lord, enjoying large-scale battles and watching our kingdom grow.
PRO
- Fun battles, between action and strategy.
- A great world in which to grow your own story
AGAINST
- Many repetitive sequences.
- Many game mechanics are limited.
