After everyone else in my city starved to death, only Nesto was left. I followed him for several more years as he lived off what others had left behind; moving from house to house to find food and firewood. Nesto spent half his entire life completely alone in a post-apocalyptic city, finally succumbing to the cold one late winter day at the age of 60. When Nesto died, the overall happiness of the city increased. This is the best game I have ever played.

Banished is the best city builder I've ever played (and I've played a lot, having been a fan of the genre since the original Sim City and the old Sierra historical builder games). The game is deceptively simple, you start with a few settlers and minimal supplies and you build a thriving settlement. Sounds easy enough, but it's probably one of the most challenging games I've played.

There are a variety of crops, animals, and natural resources. Your setttlers will plant and gather and use these to build a rustic town. Steel tools and stone houses represent the pinnacle of your settlement's technological advancement. You can barter goods with a few visiting tradesmen and some nomads may periodically ask to join your settlement, but that's the limit of your outside contact. Peace reigns, you won't need any military (or even police) here. The only hostile forces you will encounter in Banished are tornadoes, fires, diseases, starvation, and cold. And you will encounter them, a lot.

Although the game is relaxing to play, it can at times be incredibly difficult. Your settlement might be going along nicely for 100 years, with plenty of food and lots of citizens available to fill all the jobs that need to be done, and suddenly everyone has cholera and you're closing down the schoolhouse to free up some child laborers to expand your cemetary. Banished is brutal that way. But it's also beautiful. The music and graphics and effects are really appealing, and the immersion factor is high. It's definitely one of those games you can sit down to in the early afternoon and play for hours and hours and then be surprised to find your stomach growling and oh hey when did it get so dark outside?

The developer is very active and involved in the community, and new features are added often. Now the game offers modding capability and Steam Workshop. So far the community has responded with some amazing tweaks and additions which only make the game even better (also a little easier, if you find the challenge a bit much).

I can't wait to see how Banished continues to evolve, which it seems to do in much the same way that my tiny settlements grow and evolve, with all of the little details coming together to make something really satisfying and enjoyable.

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Click for Gameplay Trailer - Review

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Graphics:
+ credible landscapes
+ clear, sharp graphics
+ lovely details
- technically simple
- many gray-brown textures

Balance:
+ good tutorial
+ extensive help and tooltips
+ every action has an traceable effect
+ realistic disasters
- difficulty only affects the starting conditions

Atmosphere:
+ individual villagers
+ coherent middle ages scenario
+ atmospheric seasons
+ high realism
- brittle presentation

Sound:
+ vibrant sound world
+ very good weather effects
+ appropriate music
- some sounds a bit thin

Control:
+ uncomplicated building
+ statistics with high significance
+ customizable interface
+ four speed levels
+ free save

Game Size:
+ random maps
+ many farm-variants
+ decent amount of buildings
- virtually no upgrades
- no scenarios

Endless Game:
+ every action needs realistic time
+ a large population, a long-term challenge
+ there is always something to improve
- Survival voltage decreases with increasing skill

We start Banished depending on the difficulty with some settlers and supplies on a randomly generated map. All buildings are available from the start - provided we have building materials and workers. But ... what we start? With a farm, as effectively as possible to win food? Or with a hunting lodge, so a tailor from the skins of hunted animals can sew jackets?

Banished course is not the first game in which a city or an entire country perish without thoughtful planning and functioning economic cycles.
Hodorowicz missing aspects of urban planning, could not even capture the teeming settlers: an intimate proximity to the population and the intense experience of her worries. And just to include questions such as "how tomorrow is food on the table?" or "How do we get enough firewood?"
You don't control your citizens, but your people do have "lives" of their own, which can sometimes throw a wrench into your plans. They get cold, hungry, and tired.
While you're yelling at them to just frickin' move that rock, they go for lunch. It's not that they're endemically lazy; it's more like they're unionized, and by gosh, it's break time.
But that's also a big part of the appeal: You're not building this town. They are, and that can lead to an odd sort of personal connection with "characters" who don't actually exist, like the crazy herb lady all alone out in the forest or those jerk builders who insist on regular meal breaks.

People, more than anything else, are your vital resource. They need homes, food, decent clothes, tools, emotional support, medicine, and more.
Every mechanic, every building you can place, and everything else you can do relates back to that central theme of survival. If you can't gather enough food, your people die.
If they're stuck outside for too long, or don't have warm clothing, they die. Each time you fail as their leader, you're reminded of the loss with a grating sound and a yellow gravestone.
These serve as a one-two punch to punish you for failure because losing citizens makes it that much harder to keep up the resource flow.

Banished has a number of natural disasters that strike your populace. In many ways, they serve as a kind of random "boss fight" in the sense that they will often test one aspect of your infrastructure.
Diseases test the health of your population, fires your city planning, and tornadoes your ability to rapidly rebuild before winter comes again.
With Banished already amounting to a desperate attempt to stave off death, disasters can be absolutely devastating for the unprepared. When pests hit your crops and you're already barely squeaking by each year, you're going to start losing a lot of people.

While the process of survival is never-ending, holding out against the elements amid the hostility of the untamed natural world is a small but powerful personal victory.
Villagers have names; they're born, grow up, and eventually die under your intense supervision. Banished reinforces the human drama with its brutal difficulty and negative feedback loops.
There's no goal beyond survival and a handful of achievements to work toward. The lack of a campaign or meta-game meant that it was hard for me to stay motivated to play once I had a good-sized, reasonably stable village.

Score: 84 / 100
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So I got vis game in the hope that I would be able to build a balanced city and survive at least one winter, how wrong I was, I died like 16 times in a row, then I discovered plums, I traded everything I had for one plumb seed and the plumb boom began. I found that if I devoted my entire town to be a plumb nation so to speak, nothing could stop me. I dedicated all my time to plumb manufacturing. I set up a trading post and traded my vast abundance of plumbs for clothing and materials. After my brief time on this game I really feel I discovered the true value of plumbs in todays society and will never take them for granted again.
For example for 10 years in a row I found my population to be stagnant and it hovered around the 66 citisen mark (not including children) for these 10 years. My solution to this was simple, I set up plumb farms all across the coast, from what I can gather with my basic understanding of immigration, traders come into my city on canoes and see the plumbs, they then return to their families after trading their iron and coal for my nations plumbs, they tell their families tales of he great plumb nation, then they tell friends and co-workers. This all led to the great population inflation of 18AD.
After 10 years of 66 citisens I grew to 88, many historians argue this was due to a better education system and advancements in stone houses and such. But these people are heretics and should be shakled and plumbed to death. Of course the real reason was due to plumb based immigration. Unfortunately the great mine collapse of 18AD saw the death of 15 good miners, so this countered the growth, I decided to close all mines and quarries and focus solely on plumbs and the occasional gatherer for berries.

All in all I would give plumb simulator 2014 a 9/10 would deffo play again.

My entire village burned down, leaving two teenage boys alive and no-one else. I had a very successful economy so they survived on their own for many years in the burnt out husk of what was once a thriving merchant town by living off my extensive stockpile of most resources. Unable to have children for obvious reasons, they slowly grew old, and in late winter of Year 108, they both died at the ripe old ages of 72 and 73 respectively.
11/10 would play again.

So, I now have about 100 hours in to this game. I've played multiple games, with my best reaching a population of approx 900 people before the wheels fell off. I've played easy, medium and hard. I've read all of the guides on the wiki, the forums, and even Reddit. I really, really wanted to love this game. I waited for it to come out for what felt like *ages*, stalking this guy's FB page for update info. And I am just so sad that I can't love it.

Why? The inconsistencies. I am a creature of habit. I place all my buildings in a predictable pattern, and I'm a hoarder by nature so I'm very careful about pathing to ensure maximum efficiency of the workers. And yet, despite my consistency in behavior and detail, there is no consistency in output. In one game, 2 woodcutters will provide enough firewood for a population of 120 with firewood to spare. In another game, 14 woodcutters cannot keep the same population afloat, despite over 4k backlog in wood. Woodcutters placed directly beside stockpile containing 2k logs. Woodcutter (A) will cut 42 logs in a season, while Woodcutter (B) will cut 298 logs in the same season, and Woodcutter (C) might cut 3 logs that season. All three are educated, and are situated in homes very close by. Their food is supplied by the gatherer and hunter that are always paired with foresters on my maps. They want for nothing, but they do not work.

This is a problem that I find repeatedly throughout the game. You want a field of about 40x40 cleared, so you free up 100 or so laborers, prioritize that field and wait for them to get to work! And you wait.... and you wait.... and you wait. You re-prioritize the field. You de-select everything else on the map for clearing. You wait..... 8 seasons have passed, and your field is not cleared. 8 seasons of 100 laborers that could have been doing any number of other things.

This is a randomly occurring problem within the game. You could go 50 seasons without a hitch, before you get a spike of random unproductiveness. Whole fields can produce less than 50 food per year, woodcutters that just dont show up for work, miners that idle the entire season away in the Cemetary.

Oh! And for funsies, when you get a disease outbreak, and the diseased persons refuse to go to any of your multiple, fully staffed hospitals for treatment! They just wander the map, going about their business like Typhoid Mary from Hell. Every town center I make gets a hospital, and the sick folks generally find their way to them in short order. However, every now and then, you will get a Typhoid Mary who will inflict their disease on 100+ of your population before they finally die.

Yeah, inconsistent.

Don't blink.
Blink and you starve.
It happens fast.
Faster than you can believe.
Don't turn your back
Don't look away.
And don't blink.
Good luck

>Play long enough to get 110 people
>Outbreak of influenza
>No big deal, have physician
>Winter comes early
>Crops die before harvesting
>Uh-oh
>Physician keeps dying of starvation
>By the next summer, before crops can be harvested, 75% of town dead
>Why God.

10/10

Banished is a city-building game with a heavy focus on survival. From humble beginnings - just a few families exiled from their past lives and a handful of supplies - you will have the opportunity to build up a thriving community.

While Banished has all the footprints of a typical city-building game, it sets itself apart from the rest by including a diverse pool of resources to manage, each with impacts on your villagers’ happiness, health, and productivity. Each citizen adds to your total consumption, meaning you cannot afford to be complacent; you must always be planning ahead lest famine or disease wipe out most of your population. You must also manage your labor force (working adults), and should do so as efficiently as possible in order to minimize their struggle to survive.

The setting and the art-style compliment the survival theme quite well. There is never any doubt that you are building a barebones medieval-era town - all the buildings are made from wood and stone and the whole thing feels very quaint. The seasons change, which has both a visual effect as well as creating a growth cycle for plants and crops (can’t farm during the winter!).

As the years progress, your population ages, has children, and eventually passes away leaving the newer generations to repeat the circle of life... that is if they haven’t suffered any misfortunes along the way. Merchants will periodically visit and trade crop seeds, farm animals, and all kinds of goods once you’ve built a trading post. Wandering nomads may choose to settle in your town if you allow them.

There is a healthy variety of crops and buildings, and there is also Workshop/mod support. Although the modkit for Banished is only fresh out of beta, there is already a significant amount of additional content that improves the base game immensely. For example, the Colonial Charter mod provides a complete overhaul of the game with tons of new resources, buildings, and production chains.

If city-building games are something you enjoy, I cannot recommend Banished enough. This was one of my most anticipated releases of 2014 and it has definitely lived up to my expectations (and then some). A word of caution though, there are many hardships ahead; this is in no way an "easy" game.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=335650501

Everything seems fine. Winter rolls around. Food stocks are well beyond surplus, everyone... Okay, most people are wearing clothes, people all seem healthy.

A group of nomads come to your town hall upon seeing your vast reserves of resources and food.

You allow them to join your settlement, what could be the harm in adding some more workers?

A little bit rolls by seemingly fine, but suddenly you have no food reserves and the planting of new crops have just started! People are starving in the streets. Nobody has any food in their homes. Then you notice that fuel reserves have dwindled while you were trying to solve your food shortage problem! People are now huddling in their homes with their families freezing to death and you can't stop it! Then an outbreak of Influenza comes through, your town's only physician died of starvation not too long ago. All hell has broken loose and your citizens are dieing too rapidly for you to do anything about it.

You watch in horror.

Everything you knew has crumbled before you. A sprawling settlement is suddenly eerily empty after only about a year or two of commotion.

Everyone is dead. You didn't get the 0 population nomads mod.

You turn off your computer and go weep in the corner of the room after the mass extinction that just happened due to your negligence.

12/10. I love this game.

Considering it's entirely built by one guy (Graphics Engine, artwork, et al) and he wrote about and during development and includes notes from the ground up, Banished is a fantastic feat and project to read about and play.

While it has absolutely zero replayability (once you understand how to survive easily, there's really no reason to continue playing other than perhaps building a nice looking city) it's still very much worth it for the few days it takes you to get bored. Everything in the world is kept in memory, so your people, trees, animals etc all have names/ locations and other "real" connections. This creates an amazing symbiotic gameplay element where literally anything you do has an effect on everything else in the world over time.

Plus it's ♥♥♥♥ing gorgeous.

In short, very shortlived but absolutely gorgeous and great to mellow out on. A thinking mans Sim City.

It's a city building game mixed with survival.

In Banished just getting your town/village up to around 100 people and making sure no one is dying from some sort of plague or hunger is an achievement in it self.
Every wrong thing you do, the game will punish you ; expand to fast, your people will die from hunger, expand to slowly , your people will die out from old age, focuse to much on mining and certain materials, suddenly you're lacking everything else and die, oh you're doing good ? Well here have a tornado that will kill half of your people, it's a game that keeps kicking you in the balls but instead of complaining you just ask for more.

It's addictive , it's fun, it's challenging,it's hard and it's the best city building game iv'e played and it was all made by a single guy.
Pick this straight up if you like city building games, don't even wait for a sale, just get it now.

So according to the sychophants on the forum, this game is now "complete". Let me tell you what you do in it:
-Get banished from the kingdom of ?????? because you and the rest of the inhabitants did ????????
-Grow crops
-Dig giant holes in the ground
-Dig giant implied holes in the side of a mountain
-Have a family of two hog the first and only house in the village so far while everyone else freezes outside
-Occasionally have a trader row (just row. there's no land trade to speak of so even if you're in a relatively flat area where you'd expect caravans you just get one ♥♥♥♥ in a row boat) and try to barter some beans with you
-Make a church so the already insanely happy people are even happier
-Make a tavern so the already insanely happy people are even happier, and drunk
-Make a hospital so everyone doesn't die from the chicken pox or something
-Make a town hall so you can get pretty graphs and detailed accounts on how many potatoes Joe Blow has stuffed in his kitchen cupboard

And, well, that's pretty much it. Nothing wrong with that. It's a great start and I do enjoy what little there is. My issue comes with the "completed" status and the fact I've seen maybe one update since I bought the game several months ago (which as far as I can tell was mostly just bugfixes). There's simply not enough game here.

Like I said, it's fun. I won't deny I enjoy watching my little lemming men run around, chop trees, and build roads so straight and villages so organized it'd send the Romans into a fit of envy. I'm just left wondering "what about all the other stuff?" Where are the wild animals that tear lonely loggers to shreds if they venture too far from town? The bandits and barbarians who threaten to raze the city if they don't get a tribute of food? As far as I can tell getting banished from ?????? for ?????? (It really doesn't fill you in on any of this. I'm sure someone will pass it off as "leaving it up to the player" but anyone with any idea of how to write things can tell you that's lazy writing) was more of a blessing than a curse, because if you don't make outright stupid decisions your village will be flourishing in a matter of years, and there's just not enough to threaten that prosperity. The winters mean less and less as your wooden buildings are turned to stone and your leather coats are lined with the wool from the sheep you traded six trillion beans for. Outbreaks are handled quickly and efficiently by the magical witch doctor that just rubs some plants on the afflicted's face until they're suddenly better. The only thing that will eventually theoretically threaten your village (assuming you play this long before getting bored) is running out of room for graveyards from all the people that eventually die from old age, and I'm sure even that could be avoided by keeping everyone happy enough they don't care Old Man Jenkins's carcass was thrown into the woods for the nonexistent wolves to tear apart.
I'm not really angry. I'm just disappointed. There's too little game here where there should be, and I'm finding myself questioning the legitimacy of its "completedness". I'm sure I'll be Not Helpfulled into oblivion by the raving drones that insist it was money well spent and can't take a lick of criticism, but all I can say is welcome to the reviews section, kids.

Honestly as someone who has sunk WAY too many hours in to this game my honest opinion is that if you're looking for as realistic a simulation of a built from scratch city builder than this it the game. The fact that instead of the generic cookie cutter city builder type game which largely revolves around money as the sole resource and currency of the game, the element of having to make sure you produce actual resources to support a community instead of just cash is one of my favorite features of the game.

They've put a lot of work in to this game since I initially bought it many moons ago when getting the Tenure achievement was nigh on impossible due to either A) crashing and losing your save on a semi regular basis after a certain point B) horrific priority designation on villagers who would always die to starvation every year because they lived on the complete other side of the map and despite passing barns and markets a plenty did not stop for food (I think I went hoarse once actually screaming at them because I lost like 60 in one winter alone) or C) you got blocked by resource production and trade capability in the tools area since after a certain point it's easier just to trade for tools rather than produce them and the trading posts were severly undercapped from where they needed to be and are now. Now all those things have been fixed and I just need to sit down and get the last couple achievments....

Negatives I would have to say are the fact that population growth can be a royal pain and a half. Either you've for villagers not popping out babies fast enough and suddenly you've got only about 40 students when you've been operating for the last two hours with twelve fully loaded school houses. Or you can so easily overcompensate and just mass spam houses to the point where not long from then you've got a baby boom on your hands and whereas you once had over 100K food in every category you're now frantically trading with every merchant you can to just simply bulk up food reserves to survive again. It's a tricky balance to maintain as it's easy to forget until it's too late, but if you can master it then you'll thrive.

Overall a game well worth the price and the time spent playing it.

SimCity gone medieval on your @ss. Not only that, but this has one ugly neck breaking learning curve. Once you crash a few times (not computer wise) on this sim road you'll soon start to learn from your mistakes and begin to own the road that is Banished.

This builder game is not for the faint of heart so buyer beware this is not a sit in the park. Achievement hunters also beware, there is one achievement you will have to literally sit through hours. Or if your slick enough to get a stable town can idle it while you sleep.

As far as game play you will come back and back to see how farther you can make your town. Not into achievements then dive right into the mods of this, I'd suggest going to the main website as the steam workshop is cluttered with copies of copies. The game is real solid and the balance is very well built. It gets a veteran's seal of approval as there is zero hand holding and nothing but hard love. But when you get things rolling the rewards are very sweet.

Sim Town builder for the more seasoned player. Mods on the other hand make this game a little more relaxed for the more casual Sim Village players. Get it on sale or full price you will not be sorry.

I watched a young couple as they started their family. Over the years, I watched their daughter grow up, and then their sons. I kept a close eye on this family, I loved them all.

A fire destroyed my town, killing everyone, including the once young couple. Their graves serve as constant reminders of my failure. I weep for their forgiveness...

10/10

Great game except for when farmers die of starvation while harvesting food

Winter came.
I was not prepared.
Everyone died.

10/10 would kill my village again.

Its like sim city but you arent building city you are building village where everybody can die slow and painful way .
pro tip : When you start a first game dont think your people will survive.

Banished is a fantastic game, a city-building type focused primarily on survival. Your main goal is to expand your town and grow your population and most of the challenge is based on when and how to do it. There are no battles, your only enemies are natural disasters and diseases. One of the things that is great about Banished is that its AI works on individual levels. Every person in your town is an entity on its own. They are born, grow up, get married, grow old and die, in a very convincing simulated life. There are about 20 professions the townspeople can be assigned to and every one of them is important to the town as a whole. On the downside, there aren't much to do in the endgame but community mods can keep things fresh for a new run.