At some point you'll realise you're no longer required to be just another cog in the machine. Those same bandits who used to chase you across the map now flee before your might.īannerlord, just like its predecessors, is a game about acquiring power. And so you'll take on quests from the locals, hunt down raiding parties, compete in tournaments and before you know it, you'll have gone from leading a handful of nobodies, to a small army of seasoned veterans. The more men you enlist, the more food you'll need to provide and wages you'll need to pay, which means you'll need to start earning a bigger income too. You'll begin alone with just a few coins, a couple of weapons and a horse to your name, as you ride from village to village, recruiting just about anyone who can hold a sword. After creating your character and blitzing through a short tutorial, you're dropped headfirst into an entire Early Medieval continent of possibilities.

If you've played the original Mount and Blade, or more likely its standalone expansion Warband, you'll know roughly what to expect. And yet, despite all of that, I think this is totally brilliant. Parts of the game are either incomplete or broken and there are plenty of bugs to be found, some of which are much less amusing than the aforementioned Bannerlord Baby. The developers have said they don't expect a full release for another year or so and to be honest, that sounds a little hopeful to me. Perhaps I should start by saying that if you tend to avoid Early Access games because they sometimes make you feel like an alpha tester, rather than a paying customer, you might want to hold off on Bannerlord for the time being.

But aside from that I've also managed to clock up nearly 20 hours with Mount and Blade 2, and there's a lot to take in. Now, as you might have seen already, I did find myself briefly sidetracked by a now-patched bug that allowed me to ride around the world of Calradia as an actual baby, slaying bandits and ne'er-do-wells as I went. Well, not quite the full release, it's in Early Access for the time being, but for those of us that have been following its development for eight years now, we'll take it. Not only did March see a new Half-Life game from Valve, but for some of us there was an equally big surprise: the honest to God release of Mount and Blade 2: Bannerlord. Honestly, you wait the best part of a decade for some of your favourite franchises to come back and then two of them arrive in the same month.

Mount and blade sneak into town