Banished

For a limited game like that, there should have been lots and lots more things you could build. There should be double the amount of professions. There should be scenarios in the game like in sim city where you need to solve a problem in a hamlet, town or city. A nice feature you could add is a world map (that could be made by the player too) where when you are satisfied with your community, you could "save to map" and that community would be available to trade with. That way, you could create a farming community, another would be herding, another mining, etc. That way, you could create a world economy of your own. But not like Cities XL, it's more a pain in the butt than fun, I would keep Banished just like it is right now economically and just make merchants available once you have finished your first community so that you can trade with it. I would give it 5 stars only if there would be twice as many professions and scenarios (no need of a campaign unless you add the world map option). The game is very like the small game called Towns minus the dungeon. You pretty much do the same thing without any adventuring, another minus in my book, but minor one.

Banished looks interesting (just did the first tutorial), but it took a *long* time to get there. The requirements are: “512 MB RAM, DirectX 9.0c compatible video card with 512 MB VRAM (Shader Model 2.0 support required).” I was (up until a few weeks ago) running a vanilla WXP system on an Asus netbook (yep, just 2 tiny little atom processors) and it ran Roller Coaster Tycoon 3 and SIm CIty 4 (albeit occasionally slowly, but without problems.) How much VRAM is available, and is Shader support available?--beats me, and even this semi-expert nerd was stumped. Dealing with Gog support was an exercise in futility. It was not entirely their fault, but rather the medium (email.) After a few days, I would get something like: run dxdiag and send us the results. I would run dxdiag, and after a while they said: you aren’t running Shader Model 2.0. It took me a while, but eventually I found an obscure Microsoft post that detailed a C# trick for finding that out, but it took days to find and implement. (Mind you, I have other things going on in life besides trying to run Banished.) After I said: yeah, 99% sure I am running Shader Model 2.0, support said: you don’t have 512 MB VRAM. I haven’t the slightest idea how to determine what the amount of VRAM available is, and, I would bet, neither do most of us. So, the Gog 30 day guarantee is mostly worthless, especially considering the slow pace of feeding me (or you) things to check or verify (assuming you are able to check.) My netbook was having hardware problems, so I’ve upgraded to a W8.1 laptop, and all is well, but it was a long, unpleasant journey. Still and all, Banished looks like it will be fun, but, if you have an older machine (and I mean more than an year or so), good ruck. ;-)

This could be the best city builder out there, you can get fairly easy into the game and it is really fun, unfortunately there are some bugs with the unit AI that kill the game. In a nutshell, your workers stop working and just idle around a meeting place. If you then save and load your game, they will go for one "tour" then start idling again, confirming that this is indeed a bug. This is an unfinished product. Avoid until it's fixed, at which point I would rate it five stars.

Might be playable with mods, but without them? Unplayable. - People never do what they're told / what their job is. - When you mark resources to be gathered, everyone and their grandma will drop what they're doing (AND WHAT THEIR JOB IS) and go chop wood on the other side of the world. Everyone dies, end of game. It's basically impossible to gather resources without ruining your game. - Huge parts of the game logic are NOT explained in the tutorial or the UI. It's as if the dev wanted you to fall into his traps and fail, fail, fail. - Gathering resources farther away is basically impossible because people will walk there, stand around, then go back to get something to eat. Rince and repeat until you've wasted half your population for years without a single piece of wood or stone in return. - etcetera etcetera This game is almost 10 years old. The dev could have fixed this crap if he cared for his customers. But no.

Bought this game but returned after two hours for a refund because it was very hard for me. Tried to learn how to navigate efficiently, but there is barely any interface. Game is very very simplistic, installer is only 122 MB. I prefer RTS or turn based games with extensive GUI, where you can click anything and have some options, which are standard nowadays.