As a fan of Management games, I really love this! I had a lot of fun playing it, though it's learning curve is often suggested to be Dark Souls-esque where you try to learn more each time and the fight for getting resources becomes a massive challenge. Coupled with creating a thriving community, keeping them fed, clothed and warm, you often find yourself running short in a few areas and half the fun is seeing how long you can keep your colony up and lasting.

Being a large-scale management sim, you don't get much of a personal touch for the characters unlike Rimworld, but this is a different style of game that hearkens back to the Sim City genre of games where you play god and try your best to raise up this society best you can.

It's a solid city builder game that can be quite difficult if you're not careful early on. The gameplay loop is satisfying as you actually get to see your little community grow and prosper in a very natural way. There's not a whole lot to do in the game so once you start snowballing, you're pretty much done. The population growth is very organic and nicely simulated as every citizen actually has to be born and grow up before they can be put to work. This can however make the game really tedious if you have a huge death wave early on, because then you just have to sit idly by for a long time as your population bounces back to normal again. Overall it's a good city builder game if you're looking for more of a challenge, but it lacks replayability in my opinion since there isn't a whole lot of different things to do. So every playthrough is probably going to be more or less the same in the end. Maybe I'll play it again in the future some time, who knows. All I know right now is that I'm done with the game and I'm satisfied with what it had to offer, even if it wasn't that much.

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.

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

I can see the reasons why this game is so highly regarded, but I think the AI problems are massively downplayed. I started the genre recently with Wandering Village and went from there to the more known/well received. For this one, I've already went through 3 different attempts and they all failed for the same reason. Duke Nukem knew what sex is, and he didn't tell ANY of these motherfuckers. Keeping happiness high, health high, stocking up on food, good stock of tools and clothes, none of these are what actually makes the population grow. It's a specific set of actions at the right time and the hope that they'll not screw up the family distributions once you start building or upgrading houses.

And my God this game is slow. It's the only one I've seen with a 10x speed and somehow it feels even slower than other city builders at 2x. It's a good game on theory. On practice it's one of the most boring games I've ever played and if it was the one recommended to me as "beginner friendly" I would've given up on this genre altogether. At the very least it made me appreciate the Londoners more because, as annoying and disruptive as they are, they still do their fucking job and only ruin a run if you actually screw up.

"The townspeople of Banished are your primary resource." And by far the most whimsical to manage of them all...