Banished

Available on Steam, this game is a Civilization killer - why? Because it brings to the table all the fun, strategy, and thoughtfulness of that title (and others of its ilk) without armies, wars, or invasions to distract from the main goal of city builder game: building a city! Spend days trying to keep everyone happy while they toil away in the fields, forests, and mountains to bring raw goods to the site, where they will be made into lumbar, food, and walls. Believe me when I say, "Mother Nature is the worst of all enemies - she is relentless!" Which is what makes this title stand out, along with great graphics, ease of play, and logical playing boundaries that all go to bring one of the very best city-builder games to your computer. It will be on my hard drive until it fails-and then I'll put it on the replacement drive immediately. A solid - 10!

When they messed up the latest Sim City Game I thought I was never going to have to resort to a prior game in the series. I loved Age of Empires but the war part turned me off of the series. And while I liked Settlers, it was too cutesy and it had it war aspect also. Actually the reason I liked Sim City was because you could turn off disasters and just build the city of your dreams. "Banished" comes the closest to how I like to play my city management games. It's not perfect yet, but this is only the first game into hopefully a continuing series. One additional thing that could be added to the game to create some conflict would be to have the king find this little settlement and then nab some of the citizens for his army. Perhaps some of the citizens could have a scout ability that sniff out the coming troops and give the citizenry a chance to hide. The player then only loses some resources instead of people and resources. In any event. I like the game as it is. And wish this developer continued success in his future games.

The best community building game I have. Can be replayed for years with differenet game settings. Lot of mods that expande the game.

A charming title that blends the stress elements survival and the control of old school sim city where the survival of this small village relies on your ability to manage and develop it. The scope of this game is amazing when one takes into account that it was done by a single individual especially when you realize that he has almost seemlessy blended these to genres into one game.

I wanted something relaxing that I could play with my morning coffee on the weekends and it started off as such but I apparently found out why my villagers were "Banished" from their parent community...they are mentally deficient. First time my adult pop was about 120 then a huge starve-off dropped it down to about 85 once I closed the schools to get more into the labor pool. I slowly built up the population to around 110 and just now lost about 40 again to the point where I just didn't care and ran the speed up to x10 until it hit early spring again and I saved and quit. And this was when there was food in the barns, food in the marketplace, and most of the people starving were gathering food. If they're too stupid to find food, they're too stupid to live, and Darwinism wins again. What started as a nice relaxing way to build a village has turned into sheer frustration. At best I'm contemplating ditching this village, (I would hate to as I would like to see it grow and build the things I had planned.) and starting another on just the easy level to hopefully avoid such stupidity but it may end up as something I don't go back to at all. This may be my first and last village. I wanted relaxation, I got stress. I get enough of that from work. I was impressed at first. I told people to get it. Now I will tell them to not bother.