Recent reviews by Liquid Squid

It's a fun game but it's clearly early access. Do not expect a polished experience. Especially in the single-player mode, there are a lot of crashes, optimization issues and balancing of everything is all over the place, with certain skills barely leveling up and components such as speech skill checks and weapon smithing being completely useless. For some reason, a coding oversight means that approximately 300 items are only available in multiplayer and not in single-player. (Or maybe it's working as designed and adding these in single player breaks even more things). There's exactly one crossbow for sale. That kind of stuff. I have some difficulty understanding why this took eight years to release, considering the added mechanics and features between Warband and Bannerlord are not that drastic.

Fortunately the battles are so fun that I am willing to overlook these issues and cautiously recommend the game. If you can handle the jankiness, it's a beautiful, broken toybox, but I sincerely hope they hammer out the issues and add more features as time goes on.