So this is a mixed review, leaning towards negative. I want to be up front that I was a huge fan of Warband and really looked forward to Bannerlord, even buying it almost day one when it became available. I can't pretend like I haven't had some good times with the game, but it has issues. I'll offer a breakdown below:

Pros:
+ Looks much better than Warband, and some character models/textures look great.
+ Vanilla added much-needed mechanics like being able to make your own companions vassals, toggle-able permadeath for clan members and/or everyone else, the ability to sire fifty children and wait fifty actual hours for them to age up in-game, etc.
+ The combat is largely the same as Warband, which is good.
+ Has workshop support finally.
+ Still one of the best horseback fighting games out there.
+ I feel like I should add more good points to avoid feeling like I'm complaining, but my complaints are the chief reason I made a review so here's a placeholder.

Cons:
- It builds on Warband a bit like Warband built on original Mount and Blade. There's huge improvements in terms of graphical appearance, diplomacy, leveling and perks, and so on, but it doesn't feel significantly upgraded enough, especially with the long Early Access time it had to work with.
- Early game is absolute hell. Even making your character during creation all about combat, fifteen looters with rocks and pitchforks will utterly mess you up, and the default horse they give you is apparently only allowed to run at 5 MPH or it'll explode from the RPMs. You can slam your spear into the looters' noses, hit them with swords, and it does scratch damage because of crap skills and equipment, but those stupid pitchforks will stop a cavalry charge AND do 15-16 damage per strike. Ludicrous.
- The game has the potential to be an immersive storytelling simulation, even a dynasty simulation of sorts, but actually fails to do this anyways. You can have siblings, children, spouse, etc. but the interactions are just as bland and formal as anyone else. The copy/paste dialogue is so rampant everyone seems to be one-dimensional. You can create a narrative in your head that, you won your acclaim in such-and-such fight, making an enemy of Lord so-and-so, and then went on to take castle whatchamacallit, but none of it really matters. Everyone treats you the same based on the scale of rep you have with them and their faction, to the point where you have smiling, goofy looking enemy lords who genuinely think you're awesome and then kick your ass and put you in jail. The age-up process for children is, even within the accelerated time of the game, ungodly slow. The idea of playing as a hero and then later their descendants is very awesome, and Bannerlord has the foundation for it, but ultimately it just feels shallow.
- Speaking of shallow, war mechanics are a dumpsterfire. So the lords routinely declare war and peace based on what I can only assume is some kind of Calradian astrology newsletter. This results in zerg-like raids on enemy castles and villages. The problem is threefold:

1. The enemy always can field units (even if not many) by grabbing them up from any settlement within arm's reach. They don't seem to have to worry about morale, starvation, or troop wages either. This means some enemies never take a break, but keep pushing at your boundaries again and again.

2. The only way you can stop a lord from being a PITA is to chop their head off. Even though you probably murdered a hundred kerns last battle, and maybe your comrade-in-arms or wife (yes, that's happened in a playthrough for me) died to their lance, cutting their head off is basically a universal warcrime and everyone hates you now. On the plus side, you can absolutely decimate annoying factions this way and ONLY this way, as peace is expensive and easily broken, and any other meaningful diplomacy is not supported by game mechanics.

3. If you do eventually do too well, several bad things happen to you. For one, your lord will grant you too many castles unless you use Badass Points to sway the vote. This just bogs you down in Landlord Simulator, with dumb NPC quests that waste your time, morale problems, food problems, and dealing with raiders who have no logistics to worry about. Another, if you stomp a faction into oblivion, the lords will just drop flags randomly and bother you from their new gang. You can have every single castle and settlement in your control (as I've tested) and these morons will still be finding recruits and raiding your stuff without hope of winning for eternity.

- Companions are pretty boring. They come to you with backstories, but once you pay them they just become special units you can customize. They don't have continuing arcs, they aren't meaningful companions, and even if you make them vassals they're generic. The potential for RP in this game is basically zilch.
- The end game isn't worth it. Eventually, you will bloat out so much you'll want to farm out your holdings to vassals. Except these expensive idiots will constantly mismanage these settlements, sometimes losing them to uprisings. They'll also often lose the troops you gifted them (no matter how badass) in fights with inferior enemy lords or get captured, needing ransom. It actually is better to just serve an NPC king and let them deal with the nonsense while you play Castle Domestic Simulator with your emotionless wife who gives you a bunch of kids you can't tell one from another until you get dragged off your horse by some peons in someone else's army defending your mud farm villagers from raiders.

tl;rd it really could have used more polish. Instead of worrying about stuff like MP, they could have better embellished immersion mechanics so the world felt alive and fun. Instead, it feels like a really hollow upgrade of Warband, and that's just not doing it for me anymore.