Banished

I've spent about a hundred hours in Banished since purchasing it here last year. The only issue I have with the game is that I cannot switch away from it and switch back successfully. I've tried it windowed and fullscreen, checked my antivirus settings, listed the app carefully in my OS games list; nothing I know to do has worked. It runs perfectly on my "minimum requirements" laptop (with Intel graphics, for Pete's sake) as long as it keeps the focus. Switch away and it croaks. This is not a minor problem, and it would cost most games a star or two from me. I'm sticking with five stars because I think most of its reviewers on GoG have failed to understand the game on its own terms. This is a great game. We come to Banished prepared for a resource race, or a build race, or a kill your neighbor race: Banished is not a race. Banished is a tiny colony in a temperate forest; a colony that is going to die unless the player is thoughtful, observant, and skilled at survival planning and directing the effort to forestall hunger, cold, and disease. There are no bad guys to kill, and plenty of resources to scoop up and use, but if you do not play this game well, you will lose. Banished is elegant, beautifully drawn, and thoughtfully designed. Each map is a small and simple world, but no maps are easy: the Easy setting is hard. Timing is crucial. Planning is as essential as its requirements are obscure. Before you build a tailor shop to make winter coats, it would be wise to know what coats are made of, but the game is not going to tell you that. You can give orders that will take game years to complete, and tie up critical personnel in the meantime. You can direct the construction of a building on the other side of the map that will never happen because the materials toters get hungry and turn around halfway there. You have to know what they will do and how they will do it. If you find yourself angry at the game's logic, you do not understand it. Excellent game!

If you think about buying this game you will probably not be surprised when I say that this is a sim city variation. It is focused on a slow pace and has a low complexity in the long run. Like every sim city game it took me a few hours (~5) of trial and error and research to get a settlement running. It was fun including the next ten hours or so of slowly expanding the settlement and introducing the more complex buildings. But after that you experience its limits. Unfortunately I do not see any long term appeal in this game. There are mods but they mostly focus on making the game easier which is definitely not necessary. The game is ok. Not bad and fun to play for a few hours and maybe even more if you enjoy slowly expanding a settlement without unlocking new mechanisms.

I was looking for something fairly relaxed to play and decided to take a chance on this when it popped up on the home page - I was not disappointed. The main goal is to keep your villagers alive throughout the years and ensure each generation has adequate resources (fuel, food, building materials etc) to continue their survival. There is no time limit, no AI to battle against, just you, your villagers and the world around you. Add in a delightful yet subdued soundtrack and you've got a great title to just sit back and enjoy, watching your people and the world around them change through the seasons. For those of you pondering the technical aspects, this title is light on requirements. My PC is archaic and I can play this on the highest settings with no issues whatsoever. All in all, a definite recommendation from me!

It does exactly what it says, you build a village, slowly, laboriously, everyone dies, you build a new one etc. I wish there was more development. That hovels became houses, became mansions etc. That the settlement grew more and allowed you to grow more. Your trading post became a shipping post, shipyards etc. The trading could be off screen to avoid the whole conflict issues but more richly develop the trading/management/development. Basically a progression through time as you go from medieval(?) to whenever. I will say the support for user made mods is fantastic and shows how smart the developer is by allowing & supporting a thousand free programmers and graphic artists to develop it in different directions. I haven't really downloaded any of them, just playing the vanilla game to get an idea.

This game sucks, I'm going to stop playing right now... but maybe if I just build a tunnel, I can open up a whole new valley, but then I'll need a new market, and school and six houses. Well, maybe just one more season, get my farms up, that way I know there's definitely enough food production and then... oh my gawd it's been two weeks! I need to stop, please help me stop playing naghhhhhhhhh!