Posted on: November 27, 2025
ravenguardian1
Verified ownerGames: 51 Reviews: 5
Wait on this one.
Tale Worlds should probably have delayed launch for another month. The core ideas and gameplay are fun and fresh, it's a new direction for the M&B series but this is a glitchy hot mess that shouldn't have been released yet. The cutscenes glitch and stutter, the new menu screen looks great but the animations are choppy and repetitive. The new tutorial is copy pasted on top of the old campaign tutorial and the structure of it is unclear and a little jarring if you want to skip the old content. The voice acting is great, kinda cheesy, kinda funny. The in-game cutscenes leave a little to be desired as NPCs clip through you while Gunnar (your new meme worthy companion) pontificates about the glory of warrior society and how Norse had to raid uphill both ways back in his day. The new towns all look lovely, the scenery team is blameless in all of this. I have several really good screenies of new locations, however - all the ports seem to be the same location for each town. There are map changes I am puzzled by, like the removal of the lake and bridge around Ocs Hall for example, a needless change that leaves the area barren looking. Some rivers are clearly widened to accommodate ships but don't connect to any waterways. The new map areas feel underdeveloped and sparse, still no functioning roads in Calradia either, while entire areas remain bare as if hinting at possible future expansions, which raises feelings of ambivalence. There are plenty of new items and the Nords seem to be well designed and very thematic. Walking around the new towns is great, aside from some janky NPCs and re-used content it all looks good. The sea battles seem okay aside from a silly tutorial, more testing is needed but... It's release day. I've played, or tried to play, several times now and I keep running into issues. The launcher doesn't like starting, the rudder glitches out sometimes and you can't take control of your ship after releasing it. There is no confirmation or warning that you've begun boarding and often you slip past ships and have to pull a quick reverse which seems unlikely in high waves. The high waves don't really do much, turning across a wave has no ill effect when in reality this would sink a vessel. Ramming feels ineffectual and can be cancelled by the enemy throwing a rope at you. At one point during the tutorial it is clear that your character has been replaced by a heavily concealed stand-in model, or rather the stand-in model has not yet been replaced by the player character. It's painfully obvious. In another dialogue scene a character repeats the same line after every dialogue option and sometimes the voice recordings play without you having clicked to continue, leading to garbled lines and some hilarity. I give it two stars because it's Bannerlord and eventually War Sails will be a nice addition to the game, even if it falls to modders to fix it. For now though I recommend you wait for the patches and a decent sale price.
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