4/5 ★ – sirvalkyerie's review of Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord.

Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord is an exception sandbox experience. Maximal player agency, big open world, enough lore to bite your teeth into without needing to study textbooks worth of detail or claw the lore out of hidden grimoires and codices. It's a thin but sufficient world crafted with enough detail to get the ball rolling, and then the events you take part in shape the rest. It's got some of the charm of Crusader Kings with a more action oriented twist. You start out as a nobody mercenary and can wind up as the emperor of the continent. Or anywhere in between. The point of most of these games is to 'paint the map' but I've been playing 4x and grand strategy games for so long that I'm largely pretty sick of that idea. Luckily M&B lets you have just as much fun as a large vassal or an independent kingdom amongst the others. I'm sure the game is even better with mods, unfortunately my PC probably can't run it super well so I've settled for playing it on my PS5 via PS+. It's really a ton of fun. Some of the menus are a little cumbersome, in equal parts because I'm using a controller and because the UI is a little poor. The character models are often pretty hideous with hilarious faces. Some of the combat is pretty janky. But there are very few things cooler in any video game I've ever played than watching my troops push a siege tower up to the side of a castle and then ascend it to storm the ramparts while enemy archers shoot from arrowslits. The confusing morass of sloppy medieval warfare that follows feels outrageously realistic, at least at a macro-level. It's very cool. Very neat. Full of agency and decisionmaking. Risk and reward. Medieval politics and warfare. It's really quite a good bit of unique fun.