Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord Review - Page 4
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In general, trying to command your troops on the battlefield is extremely frustrating in Bannerlord mainly thanks to F6 existing. You see, F6 lets the AI take over and just do its thing. And when you press that button you see it do such cool things like splitting the cavalry into two groups and protecting your flanks, skirmishing with your ranged units, attacking a particular enemy formation, and so on. And the kicker here is that none of those commands are available to you when you're trying to control your troops manually. You can put your guys into a shield wall or some other formation and tell them to attack or retreat, and that's about it.
Knowing that the AI has all these tools while you don't is extremely frustrating. Doubly so when it keeps misusing them and turning what's supposed to be an easy win into a massacre. Which happens all too often in large battles where reinforcements are involved, as the release version likes to spawn fresh enemy formations right on top of your archers.
And if you think that's bad, how about the fact that the full game currently has reduced functionality when compared to the initial early access release? Back then you could manually assign any unit to any combat group. This was extremely useful at times, like during the quest where you get some low-level peasants to train and you don't want your strong units to run in and get all the kills, or when you want to put your medics and engineers with no ranged skills together with the archers so they just stay out of harm's way.
That feature is no longer in the game. At all. Infantry is infantry and archers are archers now unless the game randomly decides otherwise and sends your companion without a melee weapon equipped into the shield wall. You can't adjust things in any way except by splitting your computer-assigned blobs into smaller computer-assigned blobs when setting up your units before a fight.
Well. This was supposed to be a shorter review to quickly update you on Bannerlord's progress at the end of its early access journey. But I feel like I haven't even started listing all my grievances with the game. There are just so many things here that fall short of even the most reasonable of expectations.
You enter one of the settlements and just walk around it, and it's gorgeous. You want to do things in that space. You want to talk to people, explore and perform various tasks there. But it's all so static. Trying to talk to various citizens mostly ends up in them saying something to the effect of, "go away, I'm busy."
And then we also have a bunch of half-baked systems like minor clans with their unique units and backstories. But they mostly just serve as lords with dubious loyalties. You can't join them, can't add them to your clan, can't reliably recruit their units, can't do any special quests related to their backstories.
In the end, the game just devolves into massive wars that happen for no reason and then end, allowing you to restock your troops before kicking off again. And even restocking troops in the late-game is a hassle because there's no good way to train your recruits. Bandits just don't scale enough to matter past the early game and there are no Warband-style training fields in the world.
This brings us to mods. Mount & Blade is famous for all the wild mods turning it into all sorts of different things, and Bannerlord even has Steam Workshop support, allowing you to skip dealing with any third-party mod sites.
Even so, most of the currently available mods require you to have other mods installed and that's just mighty off-putting to me. But some just work, and among them is a mod that improves the game's garrison system. Once installed, it integrates into the game and looks like it belongs there. It expands what's essentially a very basic system in the vanilla game where you put units into garrisons, and they stay there, defending your towns and castles or acting as a reserve in case you lose a bunch of men in a bad fight.
