Distant Worlds 2: Bannerlord
Rated: 4/10
Distant Worlds 2 is a massive 4X space game where you control a space empire and work to conquer a universe of up to 2000-star systems. It is the sequel the Distant Worlds: Universe; a game that I absolutely love even with its flaws.
The first thing I did when I started Distant Worlds 2 was to scroll out as far as possible on the universe map to see if it would lag like it would on Distant Worlds: Universe.
There was no lag, and this made me feel excitement for the whole new improved Distant Worlds!
As I continued to play it, I started to get this memory of a feeling.
It was the feeling I had when I played Mount & Blade 2: Bannerlord when it first came out. It had much improved graphics, but the game play felt stale, it had no new features or content, and it was a bug-ridden nightmare.
Distant Worlds 2 does have a tiny bit of new contents such as being able to see that your spies are in prison, and the much-needed fuel tanker ship class, but besides that there isn’t anything new.
Those two tiny things where the only new content I saw at all. The rest was all Distant Worlds: Universe but with less going on.
I kept looking for more, the whole while thinking, I bet new stuff is all DLC.
Just like in Distant Worlds: Universe you can design your own ships, but for some reason the developers decided to handicap that ability and made it near impossible to set up fleets the way you would want. I was hoping the automated ship design would allow you to pick a ship size and a ship role. For example, you could pick an escort size ship with the role of torpedo boat and the automation would design a ship for you that would work.
That is impossible.
Instead, you must manually design each ship (just like in Distant Worlds: Universe) but each ship has slots that seem arbitrary or needless. Like the escort which has three slots for engines but only two engines are allowed. Maybe later you can get some tech that allows you to put a non-engine in an engine slot, but at that point you will have moved on to larger ships and creating escorts would be pointless.
The other thing that was jarring was watching your ships fly across the map because it was no longer a smooth flight but instead a stuttering mess. Distant Worlds: Universe came out in 2014 and it didn’t have that problem.
The UI is much improved, though. My eyes could barely handle the old UI with its pixelated font and its tiny size, and the new one is smooth and nice looking. Some of the tons of data is easy to find and easily sortable, though other things are hidden away, and you end up clicking around forever looking for it. I never could find the basic information on the race I was playing after I set up my game.
As I streamed the game, I ended up arguing with someone about the merits of Distant Worlds 2 until it dawned on me that he had never played the first Distant Worlds.
That is when the game became fun to play. I just embraced that I would be stuck with only small changes to my ship designs, and I should just go with the flow, I shouldn’t try to hold it up to the standards of the first game.
And that is when the bugs started to show up. My space empire had barely lefts its home system when the game regularly started to lag out and every time it did, I thought the game was about to crash, and eventually it did crash. I wasn’t too worried though because the autosave feature was set to every 5 minutes. Turns out that was bugged out too and it only autosaved every 30 minutes.
With Distant Worlds 2’s absolutely terrible music in my ears, I decided to shelve Distant Worlds 2 for the foreseeable future.
And that is when I started calling Distant Worlds 2, Distant Worlds 2: Bannerlord. It has all the same issues Mount & Blade 2: Bannerlord did at release.
Why do game companies release unstable janky games that are just the same game as the previous one but with better graphics?
Just for the cash?
Regardless of their goals, it puts a ding in their reputations. I will never look at Tale Worlds the same because of the release of Mount & Blade 2: Bannerlord and I will never look at CodeForce the same because of Distant Worlds 2.
I will update this review if things change!
