GB Feature: Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord Early Access Review

TaleWorlds’ ambitious sequel to 2008’s Mount & Blade has finally reached our hard drives, having entered Steam Early Access on March 30th. That’s led to us spending quite a bit of time with it over the past few weeks, so we’ve put together a four-page Early Access review for your consumption:

Seeing how TaleWorlds’ earlier experience with early access was a resounding success, and going by the already available patches, I have no reason to believe that they wouldn’t fix the current issues and then add even more stuff further down the road. Still, with the current setup I can’t really see the game becoming fundamentally different from its predecessors. While it’s sure to get bigger and more robust as the early access phase progresses, I highly doubt that at any point we’ll be able to build our own death trap castles like in Stronghold, or progress through different ages like in Age of Empires.

For now, though, the game is definitely playable and quite fun, but at the same time a lot of the stuff in it doesn’t work right, or doesn’t work at all. Take the game’s perks. You get them upon reaching certain skill thresholds, but right now most of them are either pathetic to the point of being entirely useless, or don’t do anything at all.