Just enough of a little bit of everything to keep things light and fun, yet not boring. Story is quite interesting and sometimes funny. It's not AAA title, but I can tell that much love went into the game. Take it as a casual RPG story and enjoy the ride
Maybe I had been spoiled by games like Tropico, Simcity and Caesar series, but Banished did not managed to keep me engross for very long, even with the CC mod. Pros: Very chill and zen ambiance. The focus on survival without trying to fit in other mini-games (think of the token fighting in Caesar 3). Tutorial was good for explaining the controls and basic concept Cons: Tutorial actually "tricked" the new player into focusing on fishing (which led to 2 very short and hungry games for me). The Tutorial also did not warn a new player not to queue too many tasks at once and actually encouraged giving commands to harvest large area of resources and construct multiple buildings at one go. This resulted in everything being half done by winter. Not funny. Poor balance of the various food production methods that once figured out, made the game very easy. Totally RNG dependent traders that are completely unreliable. Even with a special order placed, I had never seen another trader with sheeps for 20 yrs, let alone the same one I placed the order with! In my 3rd game, once I found that the hunter and gatherer would pull the town comfortably through the first few years, and a Forester set to only plant trees (not chop) would create a dense patch of forest for the hunter + gatherer to exploit, the challenge fell considerably. Most of the difficulty curve came from the misguided tutorial, and a few simple "disasters" that will only catch a player the first time around. E.g. Forgetting to build houses for young couples (everyone grew old and died), not building wells for fire fighting, not preparing for diseases with a hospital... The game quickly turned into a "set to max 10X speed and hope the trader brings what I want next year" waiting game for me about 6 hrs of play and 30+yrs of in-game time.
I'm probably going to go against the rave reviews here by saying that the Scenario (Campaign/Story mode) killed all my enthusiasm for this game after only 5 hours. As an old school gamer, I "learn" a game and get into the lore and story first by completing the story mode where possible. The "Scenario" in this case, is poorly designed and the story is weak. I soon realized that the quickest way to play is to just turtle in my starting village and hit end turn until all the research are done, the city is fully upgraded and my coffers are full of gold and mana. In all that hundreds of turns, only a single Ogre came knocking. Only then, do I train any units (with max upgrades) and buy all the equipment for the Heroes. Once done, it is then a matter of rushing through all the minor quests that are mostly "fetch this MacGuffin by patrolling an area in this general direction until you can farm the right enemies for it". Game is unbalanced in so many ways that bows and swords are nearly useless and heroes are always better as spell slingers. The AI is poor but that may be due to the scenario constraints. There is also a bug that made the 50% bonus for "Produce Wealth/Research" useless (I cannot make it work). I know most folks are reviewing the sandbox aspects of the game, which is how this game should be played, but I am so put off by the scenario that I am not keen to spend more time on it. Maybe if the game came without the half-baked campaign and is only played on a random map like "Civilization, Master of Orion or Warlock: Master of the Arcane" style, it would not get such "I played the story mode and it is terrible! Not playing anymore!" reviews.
