Recent reviews by Broseph Stalin

This feels a lot like a 65$ graphical refresh of Warband, with very few new mechanics. The mechanics and features that are added are very shallow and underwhelming unfortunately. The most significant additions are the new notable system, some criminal interactions, as well as the Kingdom council. There is also a questionable birth and death system, but it's kind of half baked.

Companions in this game are outright worse than in Warband. Instead of a set of unique and hand created characters, Bannerlord has opted to generate most of it's characters though RNG. Besides the initial set of important Lords and story characters, pretty much every person in the game will be randomly generated. This gets stale very quickly, as there is relatively few backstories and personalities for characters of all types, and the facial generation in this game is just simply not very good... Lesser Lords are just generic random generated cannon fodder. Notables are just soulless town and village officials, they give generic randomized quests. Useful for early game money and reputation. Companions are very devoid of any personality, besides giving you a big sop story when you hire them. They mostly become a means to an end of either filling a party slot or governor position, instead of feeling like actual people. The characters begin to feel formulaic as you play more, because they quite literally are...

Crime has the potential to be a very interesting mechanic, but it turns out to be very disappointing, as it is essentially just a tack on the the regular notables. Towns will have criminal gang leaders who will ask you to do certain tasks that are criminal flavoured, like acquiring them weapons or raiding a caravan. There is also the potential to take over gang territory, but it's not very beneficial from what I have seen, and mostly just incurs negative reputation.

The Kingdom council is another cool idea that is incredibly shallow. It really boils down to three or four types of distinct interactions. The most simple are votes on declaring war and declaring peace, where the faction leader and Nobles will vote and decide the outcome. There are also votes to decide the owner of new Fiefs, that are captured in war or whatnot. The last type is the "Kingdom Policy" which are usually just very basic single digit % (ex. 5-10%) bonuses to some stat such as village tax. Basically just different ways of increasing gain of consumable points like Gold, Influence, etc.

Now the Birth and Death system. The major problem with this system is the same as the others, where there is just too much procedural generation. Other characters dying in old age or battle just replaces them with more faceless boring characters. I've also found it useless to have children in this game, as it's a fairly late game mechanic. Seeing as the late game gets very repetitive and boring (either endless battles or map painting), and levelling your character is especially tedious, so the idea of doing it a second time is not appealing whatsoever.

Unfortunately the devs have phoned it in and this game is marked as a full release, after sitting in development for years and getting nothing but bug fixes and a few armour pieces... They couldn't even figure a way to make the game challenging without using the faceless rng Lords to swarm you, as they will spawn just outside your view range with 30-80 men. I'm not sure if TaleWorlds expects you to be forced to execute other nobles, but seeing as it has such a negative penalty associated it seems this isn't intended. The game mechanics run counter to this however, as you will be swarmed by endless hordes of randomly generated NPCs, until they are either executed or killed in battle. The campaign is also stacked with bad design and balance. Ironically the most fun part of the entire campaign is the beginning, as it has some heart and soul, pretty good characters, and a neat introduction. Your family has been scattered after a bandit raid on the inn you were staying at left it in ruins, and you and your brother must rescue your younger siblings from the notorious bandit leader who has captured them. Even the tutorial segment is pretty good (besides the random wandering in the one village segment) and does a pretty good job establishing the dragon banner and other details.

The funny thing is, if you skip the tutorial, you lose pretty much 90% of the flavour in this section, as you missing out on most of the lore surrounding the world and the dragon banner. It instead just gives you small text boxes with brief text on how your siblings were kidnapped and that some random guy gave you this scrap of the dragon banner. Very abrupt if you skip the tutorial. The rest of the beginning section is pretty good, you fight the bandit leader (Radagos) and can decide if you execute him for the death of your parent's or spare him. Unfortunately he does not return at any point in the game. It would be very cool if we could have recruited him as he is one the most interesting characters in the story, and has an short arc before promptly vanishing.

This is the unfortunate end of the good content for the story mode. The next quest sends you on a continental fetch quest to ask about the battle of Pendraic from a bunch of notable Lords. Not only is this incredibly tedious, it's also worthless for replay ability. It feels like a massive chore to having to find all these characters, and then when you do they just spew a few paragraphs of lore and backstory. This quest is at an odd point where you cannot listen to every Noble's recounting of the battle (as after you get the required number it disappears from speech options) but there's also too few to add to any replay value. The story quests get worse after this, having you reassemble the dragon banner, which has terrible stats and is worthless in value despite everyone telling you how important it is. You must give this to a faction of your choice, eventually degenerating to the point where you have a three front war with all the Imperial factions over this. Most players suggest to just give it to the faction you like the least to have it destroyed, as it's a unbalanced and goofy quest.

It seems to me TaleWorlds just gave up and are leaving this game to be fixed and improved by modders, which is incredibly lazy... This game is a disappointment because all it needed was some effort into fleshing out the existing systems. But instead here it lies as a 65$ barebones experience that relies wholly on procedural generated content. Some of the more interesting mechanics planned are missing entirely. I guess they forget in 2018 they said we would be able to design our own castles and settlements? This game is very disappointing.

Excellent, the devs are already making a new DLC and the last one is not even fully implemented 6 months later. That is a massive red flag. Liberation is buggy, poorly optimized, and missing huge amounts of content in the Conquest mode. I don't get the logic whatsoever that the dev team is splitting resources to make new DLC for the game, when the last one is still not working as advertised.

Conquest mode is missing huge amounts of content from the German side. The tech tree is frankly lazy and unfinished. There are zero new infantry units for the German side, and all the existing ones are using the same equipment as before. Your troops wont have any of the late war equipment or gadgets, so no Sturmgewehrs, Panzerfausts, or anything like that. Even completely out of place troops like Blau Division and Osttruppen are on the tech tree. Overall it seems very low effort and poorly implemented, and feels like a ripoff to have bought a DLC advertising Panzer-Lehr and Panzergrenadier and they are not even available in conquest mode.

The Liberation maps lag more than all the base game and Talvisota maps, a issue which is made even worse when destruction starts happening. If the devs want to be honest they need to raise the recommended hardware specs specifically for the DLC as it runs significantly worse, the current recommended specs are not accurate.

I really hope the developers stop neglecting the Liberation conquest mode and fix these maps, otherwise I will not be considering getting the next DLC.

As of now Liberation is a very disappointing expansion, as there is a lot to ask for in terms of optimisation and performance, as well as the fact that content is missing from large parts of the game. In part, I am writing this review in response to the developers announcing a new DLC being developed for Gates of Hell. For me, this is a massive red flag, as currently Liberation is not in a finished state, and resources are already being split to work on more new content. Here are some of my issues with the Expansion;


Conquest Mode:
My primary issue with the DLC. As of now the Western Front conquest mode is a absolute joke in terms of implementation and content. Essentially, there are barely any additions or changes to the German forces on the western front. There is an absolute pittance of new equipment implemented, most notably the Sd.Kfz. "Drilling" which is based on an existing vehicle. As for Infantry there is genuinely nothing added, and it is all a copy paste of the Eastern Front troops. The tech tree is made jarring and awkward, as there are units available that did not even fight on the Western Front or against American forces, such as the "Blau Division" and "Osttruppen".

There is a huge balance issue, with the Germans essentially being stuck in 1941-1942 with their infantry squads, whereas the Americans are in 1944-45. The Germans are largely equipped with Kar98k, even for the most expensive and elite squads such as Fallschirmjager. Even then, when you get to the end of the entire infantry tech tree to unlock motorized Fallschirmjagers, your squad will have ONE (1) automatic rifleman armed with an FG-42, and a pitiful few men with semi-automatics and smgs. Weapons such as the Panzerfaust are entirely missing, despite being both iconic and prolific during the late stages of the war. In comparison US troops have high quality small arms, and even cheap squads with only rifleman are capable of dishing out a lot of firepower due to the M1 Garand. More expensive squads get even tougher, with plenty of machine guns, BARs, and SMGs. The disparity in firepower between both sides is ridiculous.

If you wanted to use elite units like the Panzer-Lehr or Panzergrenadier, or even fun meme troops like Volksturm, they are missing entirely from conquest mode.

From the American point of view the tech tree on their side is pretty decent, but as I said previous the balance is really bad. On the first round of the Conquest, I can unlock tier 2 and 3 squads that are better than everything the Germans have access to on their entire tech tree. This is maybe fun if you want to have a big power fantasy and beat the enemy 200 kills to 0, but it doesn't make for a very fun or dynamic experience.


FPS Drops and Poor Optimization:
The performance on the Western maps is definitely the worst in the game, and this is especially noticeable when destruction comes in to play. There are quite a lot of frame drops when buildings are blown apart. There has been some patches to fix this since launch but the performance and high amount of frame drops from environment destruction is still very noticeable. Relative to the base game's maps as well as those from Talvisota, the Western Front maps are poorly optimised.

This also leads into the listed System Requirements, which are criminally optimistic and are not accurate whatsoever. The recommend specs list a GTX 1070 / RX 580, 16gb of ram. For some reason any mention of a CPU is committed despite this game and especially this DLC being processor heavy. To put it into perspective, these maps beat up my computer which is equipped with a RTX2070, 32gb of ram, and a Intel 10700. So honestly good luck if you are using the recommended specs.

Made a new save to try out all the new updates and freighter types, started doing the main quest as the game forces you. After I talked to two npcs in a slightly different order than the quest intended it soft locked me. For some reason there has also been no decent save system ever since the game out in 2016, so there is no way for me to backtrack to fix this as the game is constantly autosaving over itself.

Game good, server is getting better. Unfortunately this game has recently brought back PSN accounts being mandatory to play on PC. This forced PSN integration is completely useless, unnecessary, and makes this game inaccessible for dozens upon dozens of countries, it's now forced upon us all. ♥♥♥♥ Sony.

Too many glitches still for a released game

there is too much ♥♥♥♥♥♥ techno and dupstep that has been added, needs the old soundtrack back desperately.

Game used to be OK, got ruined with updates which are designed to make playing the game a tedious grind and added loot boxes. Find something worth your time!

in short; loot boxes

♥♥♥♥ game. Bad core mechanics and gameplay as well as an absolutely toxic community, even worse now there is no pay wall to stop every troll on the planet from playing

Undoubtedly one of the greatest games ever made.