People bash it and i can see why but let this get on the way considering that THIS IS THE GOLDEN STANDARD for Colony Builder games, the game shows its age but up to this day there are projects that have been in active development for almost half a decade and have NOTHING to show for it, vs banished's 2 year development, anything better than this is a great game, if it cant match Banished it is a waste of time,even now i still come back to this game just to have a good old time, cant say i do the same for some of its competitors,COMPETITORS THAT SOME HAVE COME OUT THIS AND LAST YEAR MAY I ADD

Beautiful, relaxing game that failed miserably in terms of mechanics.

Banished has a really good concept but is poorly executed. In the core, it is just a town building simulator where you start a nice quiet village where everyone lives in harmony, or at least, so I thought. The game goes on forever, until you quit, or everyone starved to death, and in a moment, you will read that the last option is the way to go.

The graphics in Banished are not that special in terms of realism, but they are made in a way that the game feels very calming and charming. It is hard to explain. This, added with the calm forest music playing in the background and I was all set. Ready for my digital vacation.

I love the build system, the resource collection, and the overall atmosphere of the game. It is all very good, and I finally thought that I had found my new relaxation game in which I can empty my mind and watch my humble citizens build a nice place for themselves and each other. But then, anarchy, or better said, bad game design, kicked in..

It all comes down to one simple problem that ruined the whole game. The balancing of the collected resources. Every home in your cute little village needs food, wood and other basic needs to survive and keep them fed and warm. All collected resources are placed on the general stockpile that you build first and citizens go to this stockpile to collect the resources for their homes. The big problem is this:

Your citizen noticed that it is out of wood. It walks to the stockpile, grabs ten logs and walks back to his nice and comfortable dwelling. But ten logs are not enough, it comes back to the stockpile and takes another ten logs, rapidly decreasing the supply. When the humble villager collected more than forty logs, his freezing neighbour walks to the stockpile, only to find that there is nothing left in store. Shivering with cold and misery, he waits for the woodcutters to bring more logs. It is his lucky day; the woodcutters return with five fresh logs and place them on the stockpile. The neighbour walks towards the stockpile, only to find out that his greedy neighbour, who lives closer to the stockpile snitches the last five logs from the pile. After taking the logs, he spits into the freezing neighbours face and walks back to his home to add his five logs to his collection of forty that he already has. The poor man cries in defeat and dies of frostbite.

I can make another story, but it is clear. The game has no balancer, no options to say to the greedy son of a b!tch that he has enough wood and need to leave some resources for the rest of the town. Whole neighbourhoods die of starvation and cold, the big piles of resources in the home of the greedy sh!ts gets larger by the minute and their hunger is never satisfied. And there is nothing you can do about it. The game runs slow as a snail too, so you can see your citizens die in slow-motion because the last apple has just been collected by another villager, who’s house almost explodes from the number of resources stuffed in it. It is just unbelievable that this issue exists in this kind of game.

Sadly, this is the boner killer for me, and it ruined my whole experience. And it is such a shame, the game could have been so perfect for me with all the positive aspects that I mentioned at the beginning.

So in short, if you want to watch a slow, digital version of The Purge: Anarchy and watch your villagers do whatever the hell they want and not giving a sh!t about each other, than this is the game for you.

It's a frequent pitfall of city builder style management games to try and go the Dwarf Fortress route of simulating everything to the point where the game becomes a grandfather clock, a huge daunting complex thing you dare not stick your hands in and try to play with yourself. This is not in itself a bad thing, but it has created a very intimidating image of the genre.

Banished is so honed in on what it wants to simulate that it is actually pretty hard to get sidetracked - there's not diplomacy systems, there's not military systems, there's not intricate settler relations, it simply gives you a bunch of tools with the goal of "don't go extinct immediately" and lets you work it out. The game can be punishing, but its very restrained scope ensures that most of the factors of survival are things that you can very quickly learn to control.

Really the only downside to such an approach is that the lack of objectives and complex "projects" means that once you get a stable settlement going there's not much driving you to keep on going.