Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord
Taleworlds · Strategy, RPG, Action
Overview
A strategy/action RPG. Create a character, engage in diplomacy, craft, trade and conquer new lands in a vast medieval sandbox. Raise armies to lead into battle and command and fight alongside your troops in massive real-time battles using a deep but intuitive skill-based combat system.
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The horns sound, the ravens gather. An empire is torn by civil war. Beyond its borders, new kingdoms rise. Gird on your sword, don your armour, summon your followers and ride forth to win glory on the battlefields of Calradia. Establish your hegemony and create a new world out of the ashes of the old.
Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord is the eagerly awaited sequel to the critically acclaimed medieval combat simulator and role-playing game, Mount & Blade: Warband.
Create and develop a character that matches your play style as you explore, raid and conquer your way across a vast medieval sandbox where no two playthroughs are the same.
Raise armies, engage in politics, trade, craft weapons, recruit companions and manage your fiefdom as you attempt to establish your clan among the nobility of Calradia.
Command and fight alongside your troops in first- or third-person in huge real-time battles using Mount & Blade’s deep but intuitive skill-based directional combat system.
Put your combat prowess to the test against players from all over the world in multi-player PvP, including ranked matchmaking and casual game modes, or host your own server with the Mount & Blade II: Dedicated Server files.
Customise the game to experience an entirely different adventure using the Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord - Modding Kit and share your creations with others through Steam Workshop.
From the game's Steam store page.
THE GAMEQ VERDICT9,999 reviews analyzed
What players are actually saying
1. Summary
What fans describe first is riding into a battle or siege with hundreds of soldiers you recruited and trained, giving orders while you fight in the line yourself. Around that sits a sandbox where you can start as a nobody, trade, hire out as a mercenary, raise a family and end up ruling a kingdom, and plenty of short reviews simply call it addictive. Mods come up in 19% of the reviews, more than any other single topic, from small fixes to total conversions like Realm of Thrones and The Old Realms, and a recurring view is that the game is at its best once modded.
Reviewers describe a mid and late game that turns into endless, repetitive wars with thin diplomacy and lords who return with fresh armies straight after defeat. Crashes, launch failures and broken saves come up often, especially in the weeks after War Sails launched, and patches that break mods anger the same players who praise the mods. War Sails divides players: its naval combat and Nord faction have real fans, while others call it overpriced, buggy and the wrong priority for a base game they still see as unfinished. One player who recommends it put the mix this way: "The best mediocre game I've ever played."
2. What keeps coming up
What players praise
Huge battles and sieges you fight in yourselfHigh
Players describe cavalry charges, shield walls, archers on a hill and sieges with ladders and towers, and stress that you are on the field yourself instead of watching from above. "Leading troops while also fighting yourself keeps battles engaging even after dozens of hours," one wrote, and another called the directional melee "simple to understand but hard to master." Some compare it to Total War with a sword in your own hand. A number of negative reviews also grant that the battles are fun before listing what surrounds them.
A sandbox where you write your own rise to powerHigh
Reviewers list the roles they played: trader, mercenary, smith, bandit, pirate, vassal, king. The appeal is that nothing forces a path and the world keeps moving without you. "You're paying for a grind that builds a story out of moments, and a touch of your own imagination," one player wrote. Reviews tell short stories about marrying for a castle, losing a dynasty to an unlucky javelin or getting captured by looters at the worst moment. Some short positive reviews say little more than that the game is "addictive" or addicting.
Mods that turn it into many different gamesHigh
Players praise total conversions (Realm of Thrones, The Old Realms, Shokuho, Eagle Rising, Tales of the Age of Men), deeper systems (Banner Kings, RBM's combat changes, Diplomacy) and multiplayer projects such as Bannerlord Online and co-op mods. "Realm of Thrones is a game changer," one wrote. The praise often comes with a complaint attached: the vanilla game is thin, and modders built what the base game lacks. That is also why updates that break mods (below) land so hard.
Nothing else scratches this itchMedium
Fans and a few critics say the game has no direct competitor. Some put it in exactly those words ("There is no other game like it"), others say there are "no other games on this theme," and some players who list serious flaws say they keep playing because nothing else mixes personal combat with army command.
Family, marriage and heirsLow
A smaller group enjoys the dynasty layer: marrying, raising children, training them as commanders and continuing as your heir when your character dies. Others find it slow to matter, though marriages and heirs turn up in some of the stories players tell.
Where players are split
War Sails, the paid naval expansionHigh
War Sails is the main new topic in the reviews. Fans praise boarding fights, ramming, ship customization, piracy as a money loop, the Nord faction and the redrawn map; one called "the chaos of fighting on rough seas in close quarters while on boats is extremely satisfying," and several longtime players say it brought them back. Critics raise price, stability and depth. Some quote 25 dollars or 25 euros, others say it costs about half as much as the base game, for content they think belonged in a free update: "War Sails should have been an update, not a DLC." Reviewers also report crashes when starting the expansion's story quest, failed launches with the DLC enabled, frame-rate drops and mods that stopped working. On depth, players say naval battles are rare on the campaign map, AI lords do not use fleets the way the player must, and there are no amphibious sieges. A couple of reviewers had trouble playing offline in the first week after the DLC arrived, and several later reviews say patches fixed the problems they hit at launch.
Bannerlord versus WarbandHigh
Many longtime players measure Bannerlord against Warband, and they land on both sides. Supporters say Bannerlord is better in battles, sieges, graphics, troop variety and quality of life, and some who disliked it at launch now prefer it. Critics say it lost Warband's character: feasts, companions with personalities, simpler troop assignment and a deep mod library. "Better than Warband in gameplay and graphics, but far behind in roleplay and characters," one reviewer summed up. Some negative reviews simply tell newcomers to play Warband instead.
Whether the game finally feels finishedMedium
Some edited reviews have switched to recommending the game, saying patches, mods or War Sails finally made it worth it, and one short positive review reads in full: "Not abandonware anymore since Warsails!" Others, often players who bought into early access in 2020, say years of slow updates left core systems shallow and that it "still feels like early access," and they object to paid content arriving before the base game is complete.
Combat feelMedium
Plenty of players praise the melee, but others call it slow and clunky: mouse-direction blocking, sluggish swings, opponents who block everything, spears that feel weak and shield bashes that barely stun. "The combat feels sluggish and unresponsive," one negative review says. Some fans answer that it clicks with practice.
MultiplayerLow
Multiplayer fans describe clan events and large community battles ("300 vs. 300, every fighter a real player") and modded servers. Others report empty or crashing official servers, cheaters, toxic players and a mode they say was neglected: "Tried to play on multiplayer but servers are dead."
Is it worth full price?Low
Some say the hours make the base game worth every penny. Others advise waiting for a sale, and several say the same of the DLC.
What frustrates players
A shallow, repetitive mid and late gameHigh
Positive and negative reviews both make this complaint. Players say the early game is great but once you hold land the game becomes back-to-back wars: AI kingdoms declare war at random or all at once on the player, defeated lords escape or respawn with full armies, fief votes go to someone else, and diplomacy offers few real choices. "There is no diplomacy, in the end just frustrating by everyone declaring war on you," one wrote; another called the late game "just an endless castle defense simulator." Several reviewers reach for the same image, "wide as an ocean, deep as a puddle" or a variation on it, and players ask for feasts, intrigue, meaningful relations and better settlement management.
Crashes, launch failures and broken savesHigh
Crash reports run through the whole period, with a cluster in the weeks after War Sails and the patch that came with it. Reviewers describe the launcher hanging or opening off screen, freezes on load, crashes in sieges or after battles, character models folded sideways, saves that will not load after an update and whole-PC freezes. "Gameplay doesn't matter when it's as stable as a one-legged horse," one player wrote. Some report performance falling sharply in big battles after the update; others say patches in the following weeks fixed their issues.
Updates that break mods and savesHigh
Players describe mods built for older game versions that no longer load, waiting for every mod to update after a patch, dependencies such as Harmony crashing the game, and long campaigns lost. One player wrote that "every update it destroys all mods," and a modder listed changes to the game's code that arrived with "NO DOCUMENTATION."
Siege, battle and campaign AIHigh
The AI draws complaints at every level. In sieges, troops bunch at a single ladder, get stuck in walls so a battle cannot end, ignore an open gate or fail to push towers. Several reviewers are angry that losing a small keep fight ends the whole siege: "Twenty units holding the keep should not outright fail the siege altogether if you can't participate." On the campaign map, armies march back and forth between targets, allied lords take over your siege, and "your own clan parties will graciously donate all your troops away" to garrisons. Auto-resolve is called unreliable.
Forced stealth missionsMedium
According to reviewers, stealth arrived with the War Sails update. Players hated being pushed into an early stealth quest with instant failure and no checkpoints, guards who spot them through cover, and hideouts that at first could only be cleared by sneaking. Later reviews say an option to attack hideouts directly came back, and a couple of reviewers switched to recommending the game because of it, but the tutorial mission still draws anger: "The stealth tutorial is one of the worst things ive seen."
Steep learning curve and poor tutorialsMedium
Some players say the game explains very little and point newcomers to YouTube or Reddit to learn trade, troops and kingdoms. The early game can mean being captured repeatedly by looters or larger parties, and a few negative reviewers gave up and refunded. Others mention it only in passing: "Only slight bummer is the games a fairly steep learning curve and the tutorials dont cover much," a positive reviewer wrote.
No co-op campaignLow
A short but steady request, often tucked into otherwise happy reviews: "Why they didn't make this game co-op will forever baffle me." Several point to community co-op mods as proof it can be done.
Lost control over formationsLow
Some veterans miss assigning specific troops to specific formations, and say formations reset before every battle or mix archers with infantry, which makes reinforcing allies or running large armies tedious.
Faction balanceLow
A handful of reviews raise balance: the Khuzaits conquering half the map before the player gets going, Vlandia overrunning its neighbors in earlier versions, and Nord troops called the strongest units in the game by one player and too weak by another.
3. The player conversation
The tone is affectionate but tired. Many positive reviews come with caveats, and some negative ones are written by players who say they still love the concept. Long-time owners, often Warband veterans who bought into early access in 2020, keep editing old reviews, and those older reviews recommend the game far less often than ones written fresh. Newer players tend to write about battles, freedom and how quickly the hours went, and when they are negative they often point to the combat controls, the stealth tutorial or not knowing what to do.
The conversation follows War Sails. In launch week 79% of new reviews recommended the game, as praise for the naval combat competed with crash reports, price complaints and anger at the stealth changes. The weekly share climbed over the winter, fell to 72% in mid-June 2026 and was back up for most weeks of August and September. Mods, late-game depth and stability stayed the constant topics throughout.
4. What the developers could do
- Deepen the mid and late game. Fans and critics alike describe endless, repetitive war with thin diplomacy, AI kingdoms that all declare war on the player and lords who return with full armies right after defeat.
- Stabilize launch, loading and saves. Crashes, launcher hangs, load freezes and broken saves come up throughout, with a cluster after the War Sails patch, and several reviews say they will change to positive once the game runs reliably.
- Keep updates from breaking mods and old saves. Mods come up more than any other topic, and players describe mods that stop loading and campaigns lost after patches; save compatibility and documented code changes would answer them directly.
- Fix siege and army AI. Players list stuck units, ladder pile-ups, the rule that a lost keep fight ends the whole siege, and clan parties donating troops.
- Make stealth fully optional. Players want to skip the stealth tutorial and keep a direct assault option everywhere stealth is used; a couple of reviewers went back to recommending the game once the hideout assault returned.
- Teach the game better. Some players say the tutorials leave trade, troops, clans and kingdoms to YouTube and Reddit, and a few negative reviewers refunded after struggling early.
- Give War Sails more reach on the campaign map. Players want AI lords that actually use fleets, more naval encounters and amphibious sieges, which would help answer complaints that the price outweighs the content.
- Add an official co-op campaign. It is a smaller request, but it comes up repeatedly, often in otherwise happy reviews.
