Recent reviews by Schtaeve

New EGOSOFT content?

Ah ship, here we go again.

Imagine a game of chess, but each piece is a boot. On their turn, instead of moving to a square, they opt to kick you in the plums.

This especially happens when you try to move your own pieces.

Best of all, you won't understand why it's happening.

Amazing game.

Good game, horrible controls.

I love M&B as a franchise and I played the first one in its earliest alpha. I remember how excited I was in 2012 when this game was announced (yes, that long ago). But this game is fundamentally broken, and the core mechanics only give the illusion of what they purport to do. It is, unfortunately, putting lipstick on a pig.

I've played this a lot, and it has many QoL improvements over Warband. But the same stuff still comes up and we're in 2024. I'm not even going to mention the slew of bugs that have still been in this for at least a year. There aren't any excuses any more.

Fighting for a faction is frustrating. Going to take the enemy's last city? Oop, now's the best time to make peace. Cheers, King Nothing. And if you don't go rogue and loot one of their villages to force war (losing you lots of influence), then they'll rubberband and - surprised Pika - declare war when they're back to full strength.

Sieges are even stupider, and broken. For the large attacks, you usually have to auto resolve, because you guarantee if you go in yourself there'll be one or two people stuck in a wall by the end. Big hint, Taleworlds: maybe if it's been 10 minutes without a kill, and you have 700 attackers while they have 2, perhaps there should be some auto resolve mechanism. But this has been an issue in the franchise for literally 15 years.

And taking out cities are even easier. Build a Trebuchet, then put it to "reserve" (which means it disappears instantly into the ether), rinse, repeat, then deploy all four Trebuchets simultaneously, they pop out of thin air, and you pound the opponent into oblivion. It's just... stupid.

Hideouts - nobody else does anything about them. It's a boring whack-a-mole situation and gets super tedious. Same with a significant amount of the missions.

The economy isn't an economy. Nothing matters or affects anything. Goods come out of nowhere. People come out of nowhere. The X franchise may have its issues but Egosoft can make an entire self-sustaining economy. This requires nothing close to that scale.

Everything good about this game is balanced with something hugely frustrating. Yet the biggest problem is that these are issues that you simply can't have in a single-player game.

The irony is that with all this jank, if you had PVP multiplayer campaigns - no fast forward, no pause, just a real-time running clock on vanilla, this would probably be one of the best games of all time.

The only real way to balance an unbalanced, broken game is to put more humans as enemies, so everybody is equally broken, and have one of the craziest, maddest, off-the-wall campaigns.

Taleworlds have said this is impossible, even though a multiplayer mod is currently being worked on, and proven in proof of concept.

It's not the first time that Taleworlds will say one thing, and modders will actually achieve it. That's basically been the formula - but in Bannerlord, Taleworlds have annoyed a lot of modders with their behaviour, and mod support for this is dying as well.

No updates to the game. No new features. Cash grab.

An older game in desperate need of updates for rebalancing and fixing a large number of annoying quirks. A large majority of the game isn't even what team principles would do (e.g., car setup, individual pit crew management).

Mods make this game far more playable but the flaws still extremely frustrating. The game lacks so much depth.

The developers abandoned the desktop game long ago to concentrate on a pay-to-win mobile version.

Thankfully F1 Manager 2022 will be released soon and the itch for a proper motorsport management game can finally be scratched. I just pray it's everything we hope it will be.

When Egosoft releases a new expansion pack

Ah s**t, here we go again

(Review text hidden)

this is the weirdest Bannerlord mod I’ve played

Really poor. Multiplayer doesn't work whatsoever. Other players visible but can't connect, shows as 'waiting for opponent' and then you can only exit by Ctrl+Alt+Del as they didn't even include a Back button when it's stuck. No option for LAN play, only online, which again doesn't work at all.

Aiming system is unintuitive and clumsy. No option for customising controls, such as fine-tuning shot using keyboard; it's mouse control only.

Don't advertise as multiplayer if it doesn't work. Refund requested.