Banished

I love building sims where the logistical challenge is the heart of the gameplay, and Banished delivers. The tutorials were very helpful in getting used to the interface, which allows an impressive amount of control over how you build and manage your settlement. Citizens can't be directly controlled, but each has a name and can be viewed individually, which is fun for me because I can imagine the life I'm creating for them. The environment itself is the source of most tension - will winter come before you can stock up on firewood? Are there enough forests and water sources close by to get your community off to a good start? Another great thing, since I am often either playing at work or multitasking at home, is the time slider and the game's quickness to pause itself. If you minimize or switch to a new window, it pauses. If another window pops up, it pauses. On the other hand you can set the speed to 1x or 2x and, say, grab a snack, walk the dogs etc, and come back to find your citizens hammering away. Minor points: - be VERY CAREFUL with build order. The effectiveness of the "priority tool" is limited. - character names seem to be really diverse which is rare in fantasy settings, well done - the details when you zoom in are super adorable, I get such a kick out of watching citizens work on a field of peppers or carry a basket of fish - the music is beautiful and soothing, a huge plus in a game where you want to play for many hours on end I could only buy one game this months and I'm really glad it was Banished!

First, I'm very impressed that one single person put this together. It's a very detailed sim of a community in the wilderness. You have to get wood, stone, iron, coal to make buildings and tools. You have to hunt, gather, fish, and grow food. And as things advance, you do some trading. No combat though. It's like Sim city - wilderness survival. It has two downsides. 1. Like Sim City, there is no end. At a certain point, your town is so developed, it's running well, and there's nothing left to do. But you don't "win", or anything. 2. A little buggy. If you don't keep a ridiculous amount of food in your stores, your people will starve. I've watched hungry villagers walk up to storage barns with some food in them, ignore the food and starve to death. If you keep several thousands of units of food more than you need in storage, the houses will stay stocked and it won't be an issue. Also, if you're mining something, like coal, they'll mine and you'll see piles of the stuff outside the mine, but it might be years before they actually take it to storage. Meanwhile, you may desperately need it to make tools. It's too bad. That's a real boner on an otherwise well designed game.

Based on Steam version. I have put around 40 hours into this game and I love it! You can do everything right for 30 in game years, screw up one small thing in year 31, and by year 35 everyone is dead. It can happen out of nowhere and you can do nothing but watch them die. You yell at their corpses for 5 minutes and load up a save point and see if you can stave off disaster based on your extensive time travelling experience. I recommend this game to anyone who loves RTS games.

Excellent game play with a few exceptions, great graphics. To little control over the villagers,to many of them Idling but still eating etc; and the game needs tweeking but still I thoroughly enjoy it. More control for the gamer would please me,as the priority section sometimes works, sometimes not. Very hard to reach the objectives set as the game often siezes up after reaching 100 villagers.

Banished is an okay clone of other city builders, but not a really good one. The atmosphere is good and behavior of the people is interesting. The UI is also good. The main problem is that there are no long term goals, except for "having as many citizens as possible". It's also too easy once you figure out how to prepare for winter. What also annoys me: most buildings are useless, because they don't bring any significant advantages. It doesn't matter if you produce food by fishing, from cows or via fruit crop. I also didn't like the trade system, because there are too few options and the trade ships are too rare. What's the point of that?