Banished

best hardcore survival ever made, low requeriments, moddeable, replayable.. a master piece

One of the most relaxing games out there. How I would describe this: Calm music combined with an idyllic forest location where you manage the survival and prosperity of your peaceful, isolated village. If you like or are interested in city or town sims, I would recommend this. If you want a relaxing game that is simple to play yet has a good amount of elements to keep you interested, I would recommend this. Not a big game by any means but a relaxing, tight town sim experience.

Excellent building sim, haven't been this addicted to a game since the Anno series. Watching your village grow has rarily been as satisfying, and whenever a famine strikes, you really feel for your people. My only complaints would have to be that the AI acts weird once your villages expand - farmers and labourers wander off on impossible journeys only to freeze or starve to death - and the game crashes occasionally. Hopefully nothing that a future patch can't fix. Here's hoping the game will be expanded with more buildings and features.

Sadly lacking. To give you an example, you get two types of houses, one which uses up your precious stone, and the other which uses the easy to replenish 'logs'. There are no tents, no mansions, but good news, there is a homeless shelter! And yes, they called the wood resource logs, and there are no planks! This game sorely needs the ability to upgrade structures and add more diverse buildings. There are no enemies, not even wild ones. Even though I had natural disasters on, nothing happened after hours and hours of play. Nobody even got sick! My herbs sat in storage until a trader came along who valued them at 4. Yes, things have value in this game, but mostly either traders don't want a lot of things, or the price is simply static. Trading in this game is pretty lame, since I just made hundreds of wool coats and stored thousands of venison - which stayed fresh forever - trading was just a matter of letting people do their jobs and then waiting for it to transfer to the trading post and trading it off. Everyone except young children are workers in this game, and 12 yo's seem to just help out with whatever they feel like doing (unless they are a student), even if it's working in the quarry... Now the thing here is every worker is a part-time labourer... I had my tailor walk all the way through my town to cut some wood when they weren't busy, because I wanted to remove the resources in the area... Now, the trees behind the building the tailor works at really wasn't good enough, yet for some reason, they wondered off to do something when I may be relying on them to produce as many of a resource as fast as possible if it's an emergency. When someone isn't healthy... What do they do? They keep on working and getting less healthy... But it seems they don't actually need anything. If I needed to assign them to simply labourer, then it wasn't obvious and it's a pain in the ass in the first place. So... What do they need? You're never told. Labourers will pick up resources to place them in depots. If somebody is chopping down trees so someone can build there, they have to move the resource.... So they walk to the nearest depot, even if it's miles away... Why not just move the resources to the side of the building site? This just forces you to drop a depot down and then remove it. Why don't hunters and foresters live in their buildings out in the wild? And why don't they need fuel for fires? It makes no sense

It's a pretty good game, but I expected it to be a bit more challenging. Yes, there was a frustrating bit where I didn't have enough tools so my citizens were working slowly, which meant they didn't mine enough iron for the Blacksmith to produce the tools they so desparately needed, but when I managed to overcome that the game started to become relatively easy. As others have written, after a certain point there is not really much to do any more, besides expanding, but there is no real reason to do that because nothing is to be gained from it. Right now I'm trying to get the last three seeds, but I don't actually need them. The only thing I haven't done yet is brewing ale, but all my citizens are healthy and happy, so why should I? One thing I found annoying was that only young couples who are living in a house of their own can have children, and if you don't build new houses all the time you'll end up with only one or two old people living alone in every house, even though they could each accomodate 8. I love how many aspects of the citizens' lives are simulated, but this is not only annoying, but also pretty unrealistic, given how in real medieval villages several generations used to live together under the same roof, and that certainly didn't keep people from having children. It's not as bad as the awful walker system in Caesar III where you are pretty much forced to build ugly and unrealistic cities to meet the scenario objectives, but still kind of stupid. I haven't encountered most of the problems others mentioned, and so far no game breaking bugs. I once had a crop field that could not be harvested, but I simply demolished and rebuilt it. So, if you like city building games this is certainly not the worst. It's definitely fun to play for a while, but it's somewhat lacking in the long run.