Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord

Bannerlord has a base game, digital extras and the War Sails expansion, with platform availability that differs between them. Here is what the current purchase covers.

What you are buying

The base game is the sandbox: create a character, then explore, raid and conquer your way across Calradia with armies you raise and command. TaleWorlds sells three extras beside it. An Original Soundtrack and a Digital Companion, which bundles an interactive map of Calradia, an audio story book, the soundtracks and concept art, are the quiet two. War Sails is the one that changes the game, as a single-player expansion.

War Sails brings naval warfare to Bannerlord. You command fleets, fight sea battles and push maritime conquest onto the coast, and it adds the Nords, a viking-inspired faction, in a northern kingdom of jagged peaks, taigas and fjords. It also has its own Modding Kit, so the naval systems are open to the same treatment as the base game.

The base game is on Windows PC, PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5, and Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S. War Sails has a narrower list than the game it belongs to, so check your platform before buying it: the PlayStation Store lists the add-on at PS5 level and shows no PS4 version, the Xbox Store lists it as an add-on for the Xbox game, and Steam sells it for PC.

The sandbox asks you to pick a lane

Bannerlord hands you several ways to build a clan and lets them compete for the same season. You create and develop a character that matches how you want to play, then lean on trade, crafting, politics, companions and fiefdom management to establish your clan among the nobility. The sandbox does not assign you a class and it does not rank those routes: it asks which of them you are willing to keep maintaining.

Crafting is worth understanding, because it is easy to expect more from it than it does. Smithing is a trade for you and the people immediately around you: you forge weapons your hero and companions can carry, and stock you can sell on. It is not the game's way of re-arming your line troops, whose equipment comes from recruitment and their upgrade paths. Custom troop trees do exist, but they come from mods rather than the base game.

A fief is the same kind of arrangement. Holding one adds a settlement you are responsible for rather than a passive income tile, with loyalty, town projects, garrison arrangements and the risk of unrest sitting on your side of the ledger. Kingdom-level systems feed it as well: trade agreements generate gold as caravans visit settlements and that income is distributed among vassals, and a town's prosperity and security feed into what other rulers will agree to.

If you want a run that looks different from someone else's without mods, the advanced starting options are the honest answer. You can choose a campaign scenario and world modifiers when you set up a Sandbox game, and they shape the world state you begin in. They are picked at the start and cannot be changed afterwards.

Directional combat, with the horse changing the answer

Combat is directional and skill-based, so the useful question is where a blow is coming from and where your defence is pointed. Shields are the clearest version of that: troops fight in a shield wall and raise a shield against ranged fire. Spears are the infantry answer to cavalry, and cavalry get options that do not exist on foot, with the couched lance as a mounted charge rather than a foot technique.

You fight inside real-time battles as part of your own army, so a duel is never the whole picture. A style that wins a one-on-one but carries you out of formation can still lose the field, and the scale runs from small skirmishes to siege assaults on castles and towns.

Command and fight in the same battle

Commanding and fighting sit in the same sentence. You raise armies, recruit companions, and lead and fight alongside your troops in first or third person, with a command system for directing the army. Formations include shield walls and columns, an Order of Battle screen handles deployment, and units can be given standing orders such as Engage. Deciding how much of an engagement to spend on the map and how much to spend on your own fight is the actual rhythm.

War Sails extends that to the sea, and it is also where the costs show. Seafaring needs a ship and a crew you can afford to keep, and the expansion has worked at that gate from several directions: a starting choice for players who want naval content earlier, mooring so you can store a ship instead of selling one you cannot crew yet, and port points on coastal castles. Naval blockades are where the land war and the sea war meet. Even the shortcuts have a price, because ferries take parties of no more than fifty troops, need you out of an army, and charge more for a larger party or a hostile village, while party wages and food consumption keep running while you sail.

Multiplayer, modding and the long tail

The online side is player-versus-player rather than a co-operative sandbox: it offers ranked matchmaking and casual modes, plus dedicated server files if you want to host your own, and the console listings describe online play for up to sixty-four players. There is no shared campaign.

The Modding Kit and Steam Workshop are the other long tail, and they are what let players rewrite the game into something else entirely. That is a different reason to own Bannerlord than the campaign is, and it is worth knowing which of the two you are buying for.

Should you play it

Yes, if you want a sandbox where the army, the ledger and the marriage alliance are all the same game. Bannerlord rewards a player who can hold a plan together across a season, and the directional combat gives that plan a physical skill to match.

Go in knowing the shape of it. The systems pay out slowly, you set many of your own goals, and the parts that decide how a campaign ends are the unglamorous ones: keeping a treasury, holding a border and keeping the people who agreed to follow you. If the naval content is what appeals, that is a separate purchase, and it runs on fewer platforms than the base game.