Bannermen – Review

Have you ever wished you had your 2007 back?? What about a little earlier, when great projects like WarCraft 3, or Down of War came out one after another?.
Apparently, in an attempt to return to that wonderful time, the developers from Pathos Interactive decided to create a project called BANNERMEN.

The game is a typical real-time strategy from the mid-2000s, in which, judging by the mechanics, a lot is taken from Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos. We are given control of our own base, in which the player builds buildings, extracts resources, and trains units. After which he sends his troops to deal with the enemy. And all this in a medieval setting with a little fantasy flavoring.

The plot of the game is banal to the point of disgrace. On the one hand, we have the main antagonist, Lord Cartor, who is trying to take over the world with the help of his armies and dark witchcraft, and apparently he is doing well, and on the other hand, the main character, Lord Berrian, for whom we have to play. At some point, the hero manages to gather an army of equal strength and oppose the villain, but during the battle, Berrian is defeated.

Having miraculously survived the battle with Kartor, our hero is forced to hide from the dark lord’s fighters prowling the area. This is where the first mission in the game actually begins.

In an attempt to escape enemy patrols

Next, we will systematically gain strength, look for allies, and weapons capable of defeating the villain.

How to play?

From a gameplay point of view, everything is fine here, but it’s not surprising, because all the mechanics were invented and tested long before the game was released, but let’s take it in order.

First, let’s talk about managing your own database. As in any self-respecting old-school strategy, we have a central building analogous to the town hall from Warcraft (Today there will be many references to Blizzard’s works), there are certain workers who must be sent to extract two main resources, gold and wood. By the way, the extraction of wood in this game is slightly different from that of other games, you cannot cut down trees here, there is a sawmill with a limited supply of resources for wood extraction, and it works in a similar way to the same mine.

Classic construction scheme of the 2000s 🙂

After setting up the economy, we build buildings for the production of combat units, defensive buildings, as well as houses to increase the troop limit (The limit ceiling in this game is also 200 ). This is where management ends.

From the point of view of combat, https://nonukonlinecasinos.uk/review/winit-casino/ everything is pretty good, but borrowings from other games of the genre are very noticeable, for example, a perk for the main infantry, thanks to which units quickly reduce the distance to the target (hello StarCraft 2).

We have a choice of a dozen different combat units that are effective in different tasks. Soldiers as the main infantry, archers for ranged combat, knights as tanks, catapults as artillery, etc.d. There are also more original units, like convicts, who have a barrel of gunpowder attached to their backs, which must be manually set on fire before attacking, after which the unit runs at enemies like a kamikaze, causing significant damage in the area (By the way, Friendly Fire works in the game, so be careful).

All units assembled

I can’t judge the balance of troops since I’m not an expert in cyber sports disciplines, but it all plays quite cheerfully, but there is still a certain feeling of secondaryness. Moreover, in the game the opposing factions differ only in the color of their units and buildings, and that’s probably all.

The game has heroes whose mechanics are very reminiscent of heroes from the same WarCraft 3. These are stronger units that have their own perks in the amount of 4 per each (in a multiplayer game you can choose one of three characters). Perks are unlocked by leveling up, which are gained by removing enemy troops during the mission. The only difference is Lord Berrian himself. He will have to be upgraded throughout the entire company, adding 2-3 points per completed mission to upgrade his skills, but there is nothing special about upgrading them. Everything is again limited to 4 perks and general physical fitness.

The character leveling screen is not rich in details

Each skill is upgraded according to the parameters of effectiveness, duration and cooldown. And the overall physical form is divided into damage, defense and the amount of mana.

And, perhaps, the last interesting element of gameplay, spells. The mechanics of their use are as follows. Find a special place on the map where you can build a temple. And after building the latter, we get a spell at our disposal, depending on the type of slab (Mainly combat) on which the temple is built. The spell hits the area, does not consume anything, but has an extremely long cooldown. If the temple is destroyed, the spell will no longer be available.

Brave knights guarding the temple

The whole company is basically a typical build a base, train troops, take out the enemy, but there are often standout missions, in one of them we need to wander around the prison and free our soldiers, in the company of two heroes. Or battles in a knightly tournament, in which you need to use tactics, since the type and number of fighters is strictly fixed.

The Last Hero

Or attempts to escape as a half-dead hero who can barely move his legs from enemy patrols in the night.

What does it look like?
The graphical component in this game is very unremarkable, and this is expressed primarily by rather deserted maps. For 2k19, this is a very sloppy job; from the general background, perhaps, only the beds with vegetables stand out, but this does not save the picture much.

The fields in the game look richer than the units themselves

In order to fully understand what’s wrong with the graphics, it’s worth mentioning that the project was developed on the Unreal Engine 4. The game has pretty good animation, but again this is not the level of 2019. Remember the same StarCraft 2, which for a moment was already 7 years old, and it looked much better in terms of animation, textures, and design level. The game contains both decorative and not so decorative castles, but it looks so-so.

Arena START

The spirit of medieval fantasy in the game is felt very weakly, the characters are unnaturally caricatured, and despite the fact that the voice acting of the characters themselves is quite good, the writer should rather be blamed here.

Preparing for the upcoming battle

Separately, I would like to note the design of the buildings, it simply isn’t there. All buildings of our faction are similar to each other and differ only in functionality. The situation is similar with units. Seriously, distinguishing knights from warriors is not so easy, and even in the heat of battle. And spearmen look a lot like warriors, even though they are used in ranged combat and not melee.

Technical execution.

From a technical point of view, the game is not very well made, either due to the inability to work with the Unreal engine, or in principle the developers did not care much about optimization. Even with not the full troop limit, the game can easily drop to 40 FPS, in Full HD on Core-i7/GTX1070, in my opinion this is very sad. Plus, the game suffers from crashes, but I think this will be fixed in the first patches. Otherwise, everything seems to be not bad, no critical or simply serious bugs were noticed.

Final score:

Well, let’s go through the key points, based on which and the overall impression of the game we will draw a conclusion.
What I liked: Variety of missions, dynamic battles, interesting albeit outdated gameplay.
What I didn’t like: Optimization, identical factions, visual design, dull plot.

Based on all of the above, I give the game 5 out of 10 points, and then only for the nostalgic, strong gameplay that took me back 15 years ago. If you don’t agree or have something to add, be sure to write a comment.