Recent reviews by Atrocity Engine

I'm sorry, but I have zero idea what TaleWorlds was thinking releasing Bannerlord in this state. I have no clue what they've been using the last eight years to do, but it definitely wasn't making Bannerlord a worthy successor to Warband. I must've put 500+ hours into Warband on my Xbox One, playing every conceivable type of character and having great fun doing it. Bannerlord has somehow managed to suck a that fun out of the Mount And Blade experience with it's terrible control schema and utterly useless AI.

Pros:

Trade Caravans: It's pretty easy to establish trade routes and start making money through mercantile means.

Character Creation: The character creator does a great job at showing how your beginning choices will affect your character development, even if the actual customization of your character is a bit on the shallow side.

Recruitment: I appreciate that Bannerlord's approach to recruitment is to prevent massed recruitment early on, and instead encourage the player to gain reputation with influential people to be able to recruit more troops faster.

Mounted Combat (Especially Archery) Oddly enough, for how bad the base melee combat in Bannerlord is compared to Warband, the mounted combat feels better and more refined. This is especially prevalent in Mounted Archery.

Cons:

The AI: The AI in the game, especially the army AI of your own troops, is horrendously bad. This issue by itself I would consider game-breaking, because its impossible to get any enjoyment out of the game when your troops are so stupid that they'll allow themselves to be beaten to death one at a time by mobs of enemies while their allied units stand there and do absolutely nothing.

And before someone chimes in with "LOL, use the army commands" I know about the army commands. I sat there for five minutes toggling Delegate Command on and off, only to have my idiotic soldiers stand there like mannequins doing absolutely nothing. If you're supremely lucky your archers may actually fire on enemies after you toggle Fire At Will, but they won't move around to re-position themselves for better shots or better line of sight. They'll literally stand in place and fire at the absolute furthest possible distance they can, wasting arrows with few hits to show for it, even against massed enemy formations. If they get engaged in melee they'll literally stand in place and let them be butchered.

Don't even think of trying to use the movement commands to force your army to rush the troops either. Half the time they'll simply try to "run through" the enemy without attacking, letting themselves get slaughtered while doing nothing about it.

Melee Combat TaleWorlds has somehow made Bannerlord's Melee Combat System less intuitive and more clunky in the eight years since Warband. The directional swing system is slow and often seems to drop input responses. I'll slide my mouse to the right to queue up a right-side slash only to have the game miss the motion and instead opt to do an overhand slash or a low thrust. Blocking is near pointless without a shield because the enemy's style of warfare is "bumrush and spam attacks as fast as possible," which leaves you little in the way of openings to attack. With a shield it's not much better, only making it easier to block the flurry of attacks that never seems to cease. In Warband it was possible to create openings by baiting the enemy into a pre-emptive swing and countering, or using a block to set up a counter-attack, but with how clunky and slow the controls for Bannerlord are it's infinitely more frustrating and less enjoyable. I've seen less mindless melee spam in Mordhau than I have from the AI of Bannerlord.

Final Verdict:

I want Bannerlord to be a good game. I've been psyched for it to come out for years. But now that it's here to see it in such a state is a massive disappointment. The game is nearly unplayable until TaleWorlds patches out the joke that is army AI.