Recent reviews by Rikkert

IS GOOD

Pretty good game, a couple of bugs but very satisfying combat and the nemesis system is great. The story missions are good aside from the defense sieges at the end. These defense sieges are absolutely horrible. Regardless of siege upgrades or the level of your warchiefs, you end up running around reviving your allies until they kill the enemies. Reviving takes forever and you can barely get a revive off because of all the enemies that are trying to hit you. You could of course let all your warchiefs die and kill the enemies yourself, but if you spend hours leveling up and upgrading your warchiefs letting them die is obviously undesirable. So unless you don't give a ♥♥♥♥ about the orcs that you invested lots of money and time in, defense sieges are not a fun time.

VERY GOOD

I'm gonna go ahead and say that I am enjoying the Singleplayer a lot. But there are loads of issues that need to be dealt with in this game. Yeah it's in early acces but that doesn't mean you can't criticize the game/suggest changes. Saying "don't compare it to warband" is just dumb. I think it's perfectly fine to compare the two games. Bannerlord is the sequel to Warband after all. It's supposed to improve on the previous game. If I see something as a step down from Warband, then I will obviously have to compare it to Warband.
This review is on how the game is as it stands right now and the problems I ran into playing it soon after launch.

Big Issues:
-The movement just feels very floaty. It's honestly hard to explain what is wrong with it. But it just feels fundamentally wrong. Turning feels slower and not as 'reactive' as Warband.
-Horrible FPS on siege maps. I can run the game fine on medium settings with 500 units in normal battles. But on sieges it just drops down an insane amount. I have to turn units down to 200 to get 60ish fps on singleplayer.
-Loads of crashes. I've luckily only experienced one in the early access myself. But some of my friends have had constant crashes.
Small Issues:
-Quickblocking seems to be impossible with how the delays between actions work. (not sure as I can't properly test it on my own server)
-Battering rams and Siege Towers seem to go down a bit too easily. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but I feel like they could be rebalanced a bit.
-You Bounce off armor without the other person getting stunned. (opponent can hit regardless of if he got hit first, if he has enough armor). I know this is more realistic but competitively speaking it's horrible. As it rewards people for not even trying to block the other persons attacks, and just spamming and hoping the armor takes the hit.
-I personally don't like the melee that much. This could also be because I have to get used to it, coming from warband. But, everything feels sluggish and less smooth than warband's melee did. I feel like this has something to do with the animations. It reminds me a bit of the Holdfast melee, which was horrible

The Multiplayer feels extremely dumbed down. Now, I understand that this wasn't the main focus of the developers. But it's a huge part of the game for me, as someone who played 3000 hours of Warband Multiplayer it is what I will continue playing after I've done a couple singleplayer campaigns.
Big Issues:
-No Dedicated Servers yet. This is the biggest issue with the game for me. No servers = No clans, teams or whatever you want to call them. People can't host events, practice with their teams, do tournaments, just ♥♥♥♥ about together, create weird gamemodes on their private servers etc.
-No freedom in picking your armor and weaponry. The only thing you can change is stuff like "better armor" "mace instead of sword". 3 slots with 2 options each. This HAS to be changed
-The server kicks you after ONE round is done
-You can't make different characters for multiplayer, with different names, faces and banners. Again, for teams or clans this would be great
Small Issues:
-Parties for matchmaking are only 6 people
-Identical factions versus each other constantly (Sturgia v Sturgia, Khuzait v Khuzait)
-Server limit of 64 is on the small side(it's fine because of the current fps issues on siege)
-Team damage needs to be on in sieges. Currently, if you're in a 3v1 the enemies can just spam their attacks and constantly stun you because there is no risk of hitting their teammates. People don't need to think about when they should attack
-Servers go down quite a bit

Big Issues:
-The campaigns seem to go by too quickly. One or two factions will snowball at the start. At which point the AI just goes ham and starts sieging castle after castle. This results in extremely quick campaigns, 30 hours ingame and I've conquered the whole map. I think I sieged around 10 castles myself, in total. The AI is extremely agressive and barely leaves anything for the player.
-All factions' units are the exact same stats-wise (Vlandian tier 5 has same stats as Sturgian tier 5) This removes any flavour from the factions. In Warband, Nords had best Shield Inf. Rhodoks best Cbow. Swadians best heavy cav. Khergit best horse archers. Etc. This made the factions more interesting.
-Every faction has horse archers, every faction has shield inf. etc. Again, it would add more flavour to the game if it actually mattered where you got your recruits/where you started. F.e. if Khuzait have horse archers. But the rest of the factions don't have them. And the Sturgians have massive shields Inf while the Khuzaits have no good inf. Instead of that, the Khuzaits have everything, the Empire has everything, everyone pretty much has nearly everything. This also makes the factions feel more bland and less interesting.
-There are loads of repeating Villages/Battle Scenes. I've seen a handful of villages across the whole map. There seems to be no random map generation like in Warband for battle scenes. Which just means you're constantly fighting on the same maps. This makes the battles a lot more boring in a prolonged campaign. This is just a step down from warband.
-Very Little variation in armor and weaponry. I went to 4 big towns and they sold the exact same armor and weapons. Yes, they were all of the same faction, but there should be some variation/unique stuff here and there. In Warband you had quality tiers like "rusty" "great" etc. this would help the game a lot in adding more variation. This is another step down from Warband
-500 days in, I was level 15 and the game was almost done. There have barely been any character upgrades I have been able to do so far. You can never get far within skill trees (The highest skill I have is like 120)
-Siege engines: The biggest problem with this feature is that the enemy siege engines on the overworld map can just vanish your tier 6 units like it's nothing. If the enemy siege equipment randomly hits your army, they can kill 5 Elite Cataphract units that you spent 100 days on training. This can happen multiple times during a single siege and just makes it so I never want to use the trebuchets/onagers/balistas
-It seems that pretty much all of the lords of a defeated faction join the faction that defeated them. This feeds into the snowballing problem
Small Issues:
-Raiding rewards very little money for how long it takes. It's good for food. But some more loot would be nice. Slight rebalance/tweak would be good
-Influence edicts that give you -1 influence can stack up and make it so you have no way to retain influence. If you join a faction late into the game that has already passed some -1 influence edicts you can get stuck on this. You need more influence to be able to obtain influence. But anything you gain is lost within a day or two because it's constantly deducting 2,3 or 4 influence a day. This isn't impossible to deal with, but it can just get your campaign stuck for a while
-Loads of little quest bugs
-Loot from tournaments is not that good. Apart from that one OP axe, there isn't really anything special in there
-The AI seems extremely reluctant to make peace, even if the other faction has no castles or armies left.
-Why are Bandit hideouts still as bad as in warband. Incredibly disappointing
- The AI seems to want to give you castles that are close to your other castles. Which I don't really like, as the AI sometimes gives you castles you don't want. In my game, I got a Khuzait fief really early on, but then couldn't expand further because all of the surrounding lands were already given to other lords

This is a very long list, even though I took some stuff out (steam word limit), but I have good hope that the developers will fix many of these issues. If this were to happen, I'll change this review into a thumbs up in stead.

Dank

Killing ♥♥♥♥ tons of russians in this game helped me deal with the anger issues I developed while playing with russians in CS:GO.

I was pleasantly surprised. Went in expecting just a fun game, turned out to be a game that will go into my top 5 of best games ever. Challenging combat and jumping puzzles (Atleast on KB+M, when they say they reccomend a controller they mean it) Great atmosphere, solid soundtrack and stunning visuals. I did have some small problems with this game though:

Firstly there are no health bars for the bosses. You might think that that makes it more "hard-core" but for me it was just always unclear if I was even making a dent, or was just hacking at a boss that was a bit too late game for me. This was quite frustrating when my "Shade soul" (your dead soul) was inside a boss room, forcing me to fight the boss, when I had no idea if I was even doing anything to the boss.

Secondly, The heal seemed to have a delay after hitting the ground (don't know if this only happens on KB&M). But I had to wait a second after landing before you could heal, If you pressed it too early you'd waste time and often give up your chance to heal. This was not only after landing, there always seemed to be a slight delay, but it occured more often after landing on the ground after a jump.

These are the only problems I was able to find in an otherwise amazing game.

Played this game a ♥♥♥♥ ton with my friends about 10 years ago, so I bought it out of nostalgia. It still feels the same as back then, and it's a lot of fun to relive those memories.

I am become Salt, destroyer of friendships

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