Marauding medieval masses mash together beneath the mainsail in Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord War Sails

I’m relatively new to the Mount and Blade series and its medieval warlord roleplaying in a siege-heavy sandbox. That said, it’s not taken me long to find its rhythm. The world is a constantly bubbling cauldron of small skirmishes and big battles. The nations that dot the continent of Calradia throw untold numbers of bodies at their neighbours with the goal of expanding their land. It’s an orgy of violence that’s often charming in the ways it can be slightly wooden or how you can feel the combat simulation creak under the weight of swordsmen you’re trying to sic on a settlement or castle wall.

It’s a good time to dive into Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord for the first time, as the incoming War Sails expansion and accompanying beefy base game update essentially serve as a Bannerlord 2.0. Old saves will be wiped, as the very landscape of Calradia’s been rubbed out and redrawn to accommodate War Sails’ new naval combat and economy. Everything generally feels more of a trek apart, especially in the north, where a land mass has been added to house the new viking-inspired Nord faction. Seas and rivers have been poured into the gaps, swelling out to form arteries across which War Sails’ fleets of ships can roam or commute.

Despite the significant changes to accommodate the addition of what design lead Gökçen Karaağaç tells me is “roughly 2.62 times more sea”, the map remains familiar. Though, you will find a trickle down of changes throughout Bannerlord’s sandbox. The previously most northerly faction, the Sturgians, for instance, had to be made a bit less viking-ish, so they wouldn’t overlap with the Nords. The faction’s also moved eastwards, allowing the Nords direct routes to cross the seas and feud with Battania and Vlandia in the west.

The economy had to be reworked to reflect the shifting of some cities towards coasts or away from their previous locations. You’ll now find the likes of Ostican and Chaikand as natural hubs for sea-trading, with each city now on the water also boasting a nation-specific port you can wander around as you can the town center. These ports are suitably bustling, and feature models of their country’s main vessel being constructed, which are cool to check out.

Those who suffer from seasickness may be glad to hear that it’s still very much possible to spend your life on land. Indeed, the few campaigns I’ve fought with the AI nations have seen my allies and enemies use their boats to commute between sieges and battles over castles and towns. Battering in a front gate’s still the name of the game when it comes to conquest, though it can help if some ships arrive to blockade a port or head off a reinforcing army on the water. When you do get into a large-scale naval fight, up to sixteen wooden vessels can crash together amid the waves.

I’m far from the most advanced Bannerlord tactician and prone to just charging in, so most of these skirmishes I’ve had have quickly devolved into on-deck grinding matches. That said, you can be clever and try to take out or soften up targets from afar before going in for the kill. Each of the nicely varied vessels from which you’ll patch together a fleet has its own strengths and weaknesses, but keeping the battle at arm’s length really demands you having one with a ballista, a strong ram, or just a crap tonne of archers given the lack of cannons. There’s a lot more to think about than in the much more arcadey sea battles in Assassin’s Creed Black Flag.

Your craft has both sails and oars, with the former needing to be tucked away if the wind’s moving in a direction which doesn’t suit your goals. Needless to say, movement’s key in battle, as it’s rather hard to do a quick three-point turn in a frigate. I’ve found it easy to sink foes with well-placed ballista shots, but the ramming’s been a bit hit-and-miss. The game grades each ram hit and rewards hull damage/crew member kills in line with that, with it seeming pretty picky in terms of what it considers a good hit. One mission in the new naval questline requires you to ram a damaged ship to sink it as it tries to escape. You get one good hit in at the start, but from that point on I found regaining momentum quickly enough to get more substantial strikes in before it scarpered very difficult.

Unless you’re happy losing all of the ships you could scavenge and add to your fleet to the depths, you’ll need to do some boarding before the fight’s over. This is when things devolve in the more typical Bannerlord mass of bodies thwacking and heeeuughing at each other until no one’s left standing. The decks are generally pretty confined spaces, which often results in warriors having to patiently queue up behind their comrades for a chance to biff someone. On at least one occasion, two enemies ended up pressed into the tapered end of a boat, with a six-or-so-deep line for the privilege of finishing them off. Because the battle being split across ship decks fragments it more than on land, I’ve also found it’s easy to end up with a handful of enemies left which you can’t locate and kill for the life of you. The game’s HUD seems good at letting you know when a ship has lots of enemies on it, but sometimes hesitant to spit out the smaller numbers you need when you’re cleaning up.

I’ve not had a chance to test out every one of War Sails’ unique ships yet, but a captured ballista-toting Dromakion heavy galley has quickly become my flagship. It’s mostly been paired by medium-sized viking drakkar and longships so far, but I’ve also recently nicked a massive Vlandian roundship that I’m keen to work into the lineup, given it’s about the closest the game has to a more modern renaissance-era galleon. I’ve invested in some upgrades for my ships, but aside from adding extra weapon capabilities via the likes of fire braziers arrows can be dipped in, these are mainly the standard ‘take or do more damage’, ‘row faster’ and ‘more ammo’ affairs you’d expect, which is fine. No laser cannons as in Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii, but you can at least rename your craft.

So far, naval Bannerlord mirrors the base game in really starting to sing once you’ve amassed a decent-sized party and progressed up a couple of clan ranks. The new naval questline you can head straight for out of the campaign tutorial helps you get just about there. Telling a short tale about getting one of your stolen siblings back from pirates this time, it has some decent characters that give the world a bit of colour and some set pieces that do things with the naval toolset which aren’t easily set up in free-flowing gameplay. Sailing a fire-ship into another vessel, running a blockade as a merchant, sneaking aboard a ship while your crew distract those manning it.

Within it, there are some faces put to the pirate presence of Calradia, but once you’re back in the regular sandbox, pirates just work like tougher bandit clans. For example, crews of corsairs roam the southern waters near the Aserai domain. As with the merchant vessels they hunt, their crews are more numerous than land-dwelling bandit clans, often boasting 40-60 men per group. This helps make them a tougher challenge to move on to once you’ve pillaged your fill on land, as the developers envisaged, but the fact you can often go a while without running across them makes sea travel a lot more financially risky unless you’ve already got an income.

Unless you’re targeting merchants yourself, you won’t be able to knock over little gangs of looters mid-commute to help offset your running costs, which go up a fair bit thanks to the need to repair ship wear-and-tear after a voyage. That said, the fact they aren’t cleared via hideouts can help these pirates “stay around as a threat longer” in specific areas of the map they’ve been assigned to patrol, which does help them feel a bit less like a naked ‘kill this’ game mechanic than the land bandits can on occasion.

All in all, War Sails Bannerlord feels like a fitting evolution of the base game. As ever, it’s very ambitious and sprawling, with a lot of moving parts that are really impressive to behold when they’re not being a bit glitchy or janky. If you’re looking specifically for large-scale medieval warfare, it’s tough to beat, even if other games do specific bits of its massive whole a bit better or with more depth.