Recent reviews by DaBones

Fantastically fun game. Action packed, cute, memorable, crunch.

"I'll never grow out of playing with Legos", I foolishly said -- "foolish", I say, because I did indeed. Little did I know, Legos can grow up too. What might it look like if they did?
1. Frantically trying to pin blocks back on, while in a frantic firefight where one or both parties is lobbing explosives
2. Rearranging your Tech midfight, because you noticed some of your armor isn't covered by your repair module
3. Drooling in anticipation, as you notice your rival Tech has a particularly rare block, again, while you're still exchanging shells
4. Driving around, doing landscaping, picking up tree debris and rocks, to make a quick buck, because the Shop "Catalog" has some choice parts for sale
5. Ripping apart your battle-tested Tech, because you just realized you can cut out 20% of the bricks if you COMPLETELY rebuild EVERYTHING
6. Only realizing that you're missing one or two critical pieces, only after you've ripped apart all the models you have on the shelf, to mash them together in a twisted, Frankenstien Tech

I'm running older hardware, and I expected to not be able to play. The game scales REALLY well.

One of the other reviewers here was like "Yeah. It's prettier. Nuff said. Lame." I flatly disagree.

Pros: so frickin' many QoL improvements. Everything is smoother, and so much of the hunting for NPC's and quest objectives in Warband has been replaced by slick menus in Bannerlord. They managed to keep the theme, remain an open world for your inspection, but still let you skim over so much of that carefully crafted content if you're in a rush.

Cons: it's plainly Early-Access. I've fallen through a couple floors, and there are polish points all over. On a fast SSD/slow CPU combo, scene swaps take ~10-30 seconds.

I have an AMD FX-8800p laptop with 8GB RAM and a 512GB Samsung SSD. The FX-8800p is a whacky model, and actually has 512MB of dedicated VRAM, despite being an integrated GPU. I've got everything on "Low" that I could, and I have frames-rendered capped at 30 FPS. It's been very smooth, and surprisingly pretty despite relaxed *everything*.

The early-game has zero problems, and I actually haven't necessarily noticed. I'm sure whenever I finally upgrade, It'll be like finally getting glasses was ("Wow. You can see the leaves in real life!"), but it's been fine. Playing as a 2-hand/Archer, I was expecting to be hating life, but it's...surprisingly fine. The new bow mechanics took adjusting, but performance never got in the way of my shot, and things have never been choppy enough that I had trouble in 1v1 with blocking or parries.

Thoroughly love it. Low-spec machine and all. The only reason to look back at Warband now is for content packs like Nova Aetas or Prophecy of Pendor, or if like me, you enjoy scripting your own gags. I don't yet know what the modding scene is like for Bannerlord, but soon enough.

The areas of polish do exist, and it is plainly an Early Access title. At one point, I tried poking my head in the tavern pantry, and I fell through the floor. Conveniently, my "tab" got me back to the worldmap, so zero tears shed. A tavern can't go losing customers when they've got a tab, eh? Another time, my gear was replaced for a mission, giving me that stupid starting mace that's not any longer than your fist, and a set of town clothes. As a developer myself, I get that it's easier than trying to detect whether you have appropriate gear already. Replace it with a stock set and guarantee no one gets stuck. It's still lame. Another time, I was knocked out while raiding a bandit lair. Those all end in a duel between you and the boss now, so you going down is insta-fail. My dudes soldiered on, getting wiped out to the last man, but none of that actually happened, because "You were defeated. Press tab for a summary" was onscreen the entire time, and the body-count stopped when I fell. The book-keeping scripts hit their end condition, but the combat AI kept going. So weird, but so understandable.

On the flipside, there are so many improvements. My favorite is the Notables section. When you visit a town, castle, or village, the quest-givers are shown at the top, marked if they've got an active quest to give, and you can click their face to teleport to their in-scene location. HUGE time-saver. In Warband, I had a personal hack to grant an extra 500 Agility as a fastforward button, becasue the "Elder" or "Guildmaster" was often hiding deep in a scene -- don't get me started on hunting Nervous Man for the fugitive murderer quest. This Notables section removes all that scene swapping and slowly walking around town (manuevering a fat barge down tiny streets is hardly better, if you've got a low riding skill) with neatly "fast travelling" to that place in the village/city/castle/tavern.

That's just one of the major quality of life improvements. There are so many. The way hiring works? Inventory -- God, thank you! -- being weight-based? Abilities all improving with use, rather than level-up only? Ability perks, even if the Polearm tree sucks? Actually finding NPC's nice to look at (minus that many of the female notables look like weird Bratz dolls "imagined" as a real person), and thinking my own gear is snappy? The in-battle commands system? I haven't even messed with caravans, enterprises, smithing, sieges -- so much I've only bumped into out of necessity.

Again on the opening note, Warband is a bit over a single gigabyte of data. I've got a few 1GB+ mods going, and I've done some of my own work, mostly just scripting. My Warband folder is 9GB total, with maybe another 3GB for the Vikings Conquest DLC. This game is 35GB. You don't randomly have 15 times the size when you don't have any improvements.

To Taleworld, thank you for having the guts to put out a marvelously detailed game, and still give people shortcuts to skip over your hard work. It means so much that there is something there, and when I'm not in a rush, I can just soak it in.

The game itself isn't anything particularly groundbreaking, except that it does everything that it does really well, and it has a stupendous mod community backing it. The only problems I've ever had are just tweaks in how things work, and even if you don't feel like making a mod to affect that tweak, there's probably a mod that handles it. It's great, I love it, and uhm, I'ma get back to playing it.

I bought it sight unseen, purely on the basis of my experience with Bastion. In short, I was not disappointed. It is a thoroughly different game than bastion. Much slower-paced, but in a sitting-on-the-dock-sipping-a-cold-drink sort of way. Where Bastion was a frantic-paced game with perfectly spaced downtime and enough customization to dramatically change the experience, Transistor is the customization.

Oh, and the music. Don't forget the music.