Banished (2014)

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.

Banished is a city-manager made by one person along the lines of games like Settlers and Sim City. Instead of managing giant, thriving metropoles, Banished has you managing a relatively small group of medieval exiles who are starting a new life for themselves in the wilderness. Instead of managing power, waste disposal and other utilities, You only really need to worry about staying alive.

Depending on the difficulty you start with 4 to 6 families in a small, medium or large randomly generated map. You can also choose terrain type and the harshness of the weather. From this small group you need to collect resources from the wilderness and start building your town. You can assign villagers to different jobs, e.g. woodcutters, hunters, gatherers, farmers, fishermen, blacksmiths, etc. You must manage your people and make sure you have enough food, firewood, clothing, medicine and tools to keep the town moving. Build too quickly and you'll see a population explosion that could lead to food shortages. Don't build quick enough and you could have a labour shortage on your hands.

The learning curve is quite steep and this game can be very unforgiving if you're not prepared. An early cold snap can kill your crops before you can harvest, leading to famine. If you don't stockpile enough firewood before winter your people will freeze. If you don't have a hospital set up you could be facing an outbreak of influenza. Once a disaster like this happens it can be very hard to recover. I highly suggest reading the in-game tutorials/watching a guide online or you may get frustrated.

The only big downside I found with the game was there is basically no end-game and no tech tree/research, I found that once I'd reached a certain point there's not much to do but keep expanding. This is it's own challenge but I would have liked to be able to do things like upgrade the efficiency of buildings, increase crop yield and stuff like that.

The game has a pleasing style and soundtrack so you can lose hours while managing your little town. There's also a pretty large modding community. From simple aesthetic changes to overhauls of certain systems. It can be a lot of fun to mess around with and can increase the life of the game if you're into that stuff.

If you like city-builder/management games then you should give this a try. It's usually around $25 but can be as little at $5-$10 during sales.

This game is........... boring. It's fun setting up your city, but after you've got one of everything, you might as well go take a nap. Nothing changes. Nothing new or interesting happens.

All of the achievements are so unattainable because who is going to sit through 100 years or whatever of the same boring day to day life. Give me a tech tree or something, yeesh.

This game is........... boring. It's fun setting up your city, but after you've got one of everything, you might as well go take a nap. Nothing changes. Nothing new or interesting happens.

All of the achievements are so unattainable because who is going to sit through 100 years or whatever of the same boring day to day life. Give me a tech tree or something, yeesh.