Recent reviews by Shmup

Good

Cute and easy going. I love the concept and this game has so much potential. Despite this I feel like you all the content is experience within the first couple of hours and from that put its just repeating.

I wish this was Early access as this game just does enough for the price making it feel pretty bare bones. I can't help playing this game thinking I wish it had more.

My personal wish list:
- More than 1 Breed
- Animal with more life to them, e.g they escape when you leave the gate open, fight with other animals and need to split them
- Develop and train animals to become more adoptable
- Take dog outside shelter for walks
- Adopt your own animal to keep in shelter
- Take trained animals to competitions
- Hire staff to do some of the busy work
- Different starts, I would prefer to start from scratch not a pretty well built up shelter

I have encountered 1 bug during 3 hours where I can't place objects on land I bought. Pretty significant and restarting doesn't help. Hopefully patched soon.

So is it worth it? Probably but I really hope this game gets updated.

Amazing Sandbox game

I really love the premises and will most likely buy it again at later stages of development however the game play loop is just too simple and boring for me right with not so much customisation. To me, the steam workshop would be a huge bonus.

I'm gonna give a postive review as it is EA and the foundations are great. I've added it to my follow and I'll be looking for an excuse to buy this again.

Beautiful style, satisfying combat, some of the best voice acting I have ever heard in gaming. Its a hell of a rough-lite; I highly reccommend this one. I hope it will get mod support to keep things fresh as eventually I will milk this game dry.

Great game, great feel to the combat and not getting old yet.

Review done in early access where developers are providing consistent updates to the game.

Great game, punishing and not much rooms for errors and you can loose hours or progress from your rushing too fast into a boulder

I'm really split between a postive and negative review.

I racked 1000+ hours on DD1 and hated DD2. I invested in the kick starter for around £20 on the idea that this kinda remastered DD1.

I've played this game a bit, its okay. I cant narrow down my issues with the game apart the art style is not for me and the feel/weight of the game feels off. I know, not very helpful.

Honestly, this isn't a bad game by any means but DD1 is just subjectively better for me. I think the 70% review score is quite fair in that regard. Either way, if I'm ever in the mood for Dungeon defenders; for now I'll be hopping on number 1.

Great game, great time sink

Bannerlord adds many new welcome features to the mount and blade series, massive visual updates and seems to have a great foundation to get this game where it can be. However, for me right now these features and additions are too rough around the edges and as a player I seem to be working around them rather than just enjoying them. To me, its so frustrating because as a player the elements stopping me from enjoying the game seem so easy to fix; rejigging numbers; small features etc and I could be the minority here but for me such a shame they are so close. Here are some examples:

TLDR: Skills unrewarding, Economy unbalanced and unfun, Sieges defence RNG and a pain, Kingdom Mechanics limiting, Loot garbage, Battles Boring.


Skills Tree:
The skill tree in Bannerlord somehow also feels limiting rather than empowering. I feel like I must spec into something or have no clue what I want to spend my points; I don’t look forward to my next levels, I don’t feel the difference and it certainly feels bad when you just don’t want anything. Comparing this to Warband; the levels meant something and didn’t feel restrictive; you could see and feel your raw stats going up after every level.

Kingdoms / Army’s:
Armies were a great addition to the game but once again its just feels so limiting. You can only form an army when you have a kingdom and to start a kingdom you require at least one fief. So RIP any Bandit Army’s etc. This also becomes a problem since when you try and take a fief without an army; most of the time an enemy army turns up your forces to run; since no matter how strong you are you cannot match their numbers. To get around this I joined a kingdom and then pretty much instantly left; keeping the fief and pissing everyone in that kingdom off and then losing the fief to the overwhelming numbers. But it’s okay, because I got to start and keep my own kingdom and now can form armies to take over appropriate enemies. But I have to ask again, Why? Why make it so you require a Kingdom to form an army, it just seems anti-fun to me.

Economy:
Workshops and Caravans offers passive income for a hefty price of 10-20k, for this investment you can expect around 150 a day return per investment; okay deal a bit low for my liking but okay. However, the alternative is you can just make a 2h-sword for 150,000 in 30 seconds and be on your way. If you choose to not use blacksmithing to cheese you way to economy freedom, then good luck; the only other way to make money to support a kingdom is through war. Once I have a few cities and castles, I would have 800k in the bank during war time and drop to 5k during peace; even with workshops and Caravans. To me, this doesn’t feel good as a gameplay loop; as I feel the need to be in way and my own kingdom cant support its self regardless of how well I upgraded it.

Sieges:
I love sieges in the game, especially the defence. Holding 200 v 1000 troops and barely coming out on top feels amazing. But for some reason; you can’t choose what sieges defence you build!? Or at least its such hidden that after 20minutes of googling I can’t figure out how. This means that you left to RNG of the AI as it only wants to build ballista’s for some reason even though the enemy is bring a siege tower which you have no chance of destroying now. So, Il reload the game and hope AI bless me with a catapult so I can have a chance. I honestly think I’m missing something here because why the hell would they do this design decision; just let us choose our own defences.
Defence sieges too are so rare to be able to participate in. In Warband you used to be able to walk up to you fief being siege and join the defence without losing troops; unrealistic but at least you got to experience that part of the game. In bannerlord you have to sacrifice a bunch of troops to be able to. Once again, just is unfun to me. I don’t want to have to camp my city to participate in defences or be punished for leaving it during war.

Battles:
Battles are a weird one for me in bannerlord, when I heard about the different lords having difference personalities and it will show in battle it sounded so cool. But in reality, the lord either camps or charges you and you pretty much have to do the opposite in most cases unless you want a long drawn out or costly battle.

The loot from these battles too is such garbage, gone are the days of being able get Mid-tier gear from sea raiders or getting lucky and finding top-tier gear from killing a lord etc. The most expensive bit of gear I found is around 3,000 with the most expensive gear selling up to 200,000. All my gear is bought from the shops and all the loot is just a bunch of useless stuff you sell to keep your army afloat. This takes away from the loot aspect of battles; you do it for the renown, money, and strategy; I don’t even bother checking the loot anymore. There are mods to fix this but it’s just such a same this excitement from the game gone.

Do I recommend the game in its current state?
No, the £40 for price tag is too much unless you want to invest into the game future. If you fancied playing mount and blade, try Warband. You can pick up super cheap and there are so many mods out there to further add to the experience.

I really hope they will fix some of these issues, I've put in 500+ hours into the series so far, i want this game to succeed but its not quite there yet for me.