Buy Banished

Banished is a city-building strategy game developed and published by Shining Rock Software LLC. It was released in February 2014. In Banished, you control a group of individuals that want to start a new life by developing a new city. You develop your city by increasing your population, gathering resources, and constructing buildings. The game embraces simplicity as trade is the primary currency and not money. This review will cover the gameplay, the integrated Steam Workshop, and the performance and graphics.

Banished presents strong and complex gameplay as game mechanics heavily alter the game. You will learn some mechanics as you play the game whereas other mechanics such as average health and average happiness are presented on the UI. For instance, average health represents an average of all your citizens health. The worse health your city has the less productive they are and the higher chance they have of dying. Furthermore, couple worse average health with the dynamic weather seasons and expect them not to be productive in Winter. As you continuously learn the game you will learn how to strategise and manage your city while incorporating the various game mechanics and the weather seasons, which all seasons have an effect on your city. Other mechanics have long-term implications. For instance, when children turn 10 they can enrol into a school until they turn 17. If they don't enrol you can use them as workers. If they enrol, you cannot use them as workers, but educated citizens will be much more productive long-term compared to uneducated workers. So by and large, these game mechanics emphasis strategy and they showcase the challenging nature of Banished because it is a very difficult game.

Also on gameplay, the game incorporates randomly generated maps that have different amounts of water, hills, and so forth. These affect your plans for your city, but there is a very useful and very informative UI that is customisable. It allows you to add different data to your screen which constantly updates. Specifically, if you want to keep your storage house information box on the screen, you can move it to the top left corner. Overall, the game teaches you about strategy, understanding the mechanics and their consequences, and to assist you allows you to customise your screen with informative UI to help you manage.

Banished uses Steam Workshop. Briefly, Steam Workshop allows individuals that own the game to tweak it, improve it, and mod it. I will admit for the majority of my play time I used Banished Plus, a large mod that provides more balance to the game by tweaking mechanics to reduce the fast-paced length of the game and increase realism. There are an abundance of other mods that once you download the game will inform you of any compatibility issues, which is a nice and handy tool. I use Banished Plus because I think the vanilla game is basic and fast-paced because there are not many buildings in the game are citizens can be very stupid and lazy. Furthermore, add these with the lack of long-term objectives showcase the need for mods to help improve the behaviour of your citizens and expand the amount of content. Therefore, using mods drastically improved my experience of the game. And as a side note, I generally think the developers should have made DLC to expand the content to give more replayability.

Technically, Shining Rock have excellently optimised this game. I can play it on max settings and achieve a constant 60FPS on x10 speed. Features like the weather system and the large amounts of population usually would hit the game in performance, but for the most part I did not experience that. At 110 population on x10 speed I stayed at 60FPS. At 220 population, I was managing a solid 50FPS with the drop due to a larger city and more population. It is evident the six patches in Banished helped improve the performance of it. Graphically, the game is gorgeous. Buildings and citizens are very detailed and the weather system adds a layer of realism to it.

Banished is a very good game. I love the complex gameplay through the variety of game mechanics and their effects on other mechanics. I absolutely adore the beautiful graphics as the buildings are incredibly detailed, the seasons are highly realistic and the scenery is just superb. Banished has excellent performance as I managed to sustain 60FPS for the majority of my play through. It was only at 200+ population I started to see a small dip in FPS and performance. At USD$19.99, I recommend purchasing Banished because overall, it has high replayability.

8.5/10

- Steam workshop.
- Complex gameplay through the various game mechanics.
- Beautiful graphics.
- Excellent performance.
- Weather system.
- UI.

- Lack of content.
- No long-term objective.
- The disappointing fundamentals in the vanilla game.

If you found this review helpful, please give it a thumbs up. If you would also like to follow my reviews more easily, be sure to join my group Antwog's Analysis (Reviews). I also write reviews for TeamTom's Reviews.

http://store.steampowered.com/app/242920/

More incest than Game of Thrones!

Banished is a strange game. It has a great aesthetic - especially in the winter - that is compelling enough to keep you coming back for more. There's nothing quite like the sight of your little village covered in a blanket of snow, smoke billowing out of every chimney. Aesthetic, however, isn't really enough to hold your focus for too long. Other reviews go into great detail about what you need to do to succeed but it can be summed up in two parts - gather resources and breed.

At first this can be a fun balancing act to play out. Too much breeding and you're resources will start to dry up fast, too little and you'll struggle to get those resources quick enough to sustain your population much less grow it. Once you find the happy medium that works for your village to can plug along fairly well, at least for a while. Banished is big on throwing natural disasters at you - or at least it was for me. In three consecutive playthroughs I had things moving along wonderfully when a tornado would touch down and level my town. My population was decimated and despite my best efforts all three towns eventually died out.

Overall, that's the issue with Banished. It's not so much a city builder so much as it's a city survival game. The AI doesn't help, either, as citizens of your town can be frustratingly foolish. More than once I watched a citizen wander into the forest looking for food only to starve to death out in the wilderness when there was a surplus of food sitting in the barn for them. An even worse example for you: I once had a town starve to death despite it being flushed with productive farms. Over half of my population were farmers, herdsman, and fishermen and they still somehow found a way to starve to death, all of them. There's nothing more bleak and yet ironic than watching a farmer harvest his crops, the only person residing in a town of once over 50, slowly starving to death. And rest assured, the farmer died just like all of his friends and family, starving to death in the middle of his field.Throw a tornado or fire in on top of that, leveling a perfectly good town in its prime, and the game can become painfully frustrating.

Banished is not a bad game but like most of the reviews on here, I'll tell you the truth - there's not a lot to it. You can build a sprawling metropolis if you want but there's nothing to do with it. There's no end-game, nothing to strive for beyond trying to surive as long as possible. You can't go out and get revenge on the town that kicked out your founders or even interact with other villages. Your only contact to the outside world are solitary traders, the only evidence of life outside of your village. This game could be easily be cast as settling another planet for the first time, it's that empty. If you can get it on sale for cheap, buy it. It is fun at first and, like I said, can be beautiful in a quaint, colonial kind of way. Just understand that after a while it will lose its spice.

...can't review...

...playing banished...

...send food...

...2,500 units should be enough.

Dude, this game is not easy. You think OK I can keep a bunch of little pixel people alive. Yeah it’s harder than it looks. Banished is a delicate balance between population control and food production and it takes time to master. Don’t be upset if your first few settlements go up in smoke (sometimes literally), this game is about what have you learned. You don’t fail with your settlements you learn new ways of what works and what doesn’t. There are some helpful guides out there that give you some great tips on making your life and the lives of your pixel people better. Here are some of mine.
~ Be mindful how many houses you build. But just enough to house your people but not enough to let them breed out of control.

~ FOOD! Food is your number one enemy in this game.

~Firewood, you don’t need it much in the summer. But don’t let your little people freeze in the winter.

~ If you have people die, take workers off things like mining, timber cutting and blacksmithing (if you have a stock pile of tools) and move them to food.

~ Trade, trading is a key backbone to this game.

~Chickens are your best friends. Cows and sheep take forever to grow but chickens are a good and quick food sorce.

~ AOE players, throw out everything you know from AOE it DOES NOT APPLY HERE.

Banished is fun for awhile, but like everybody else will tell you, there is no end game, no drive, no reason to continue.

Most of the challenge comes from bad AI, not necessarily good design. After a point, like everybody else has pointed out, there's no reason to continue playing, because it'll just break itself. Bugs will bring you to your knees in an established settlement, long before the elements do.

Unfortunately as you can see by checking the update history, this game has long been abandoned, there is no reasonable hope of the devs doing further improvement/end-game/development/etc.

Save your money, for $20, there are *FAR* more compelling titles on Steam.

Alright, let's establish what Banished is NOT.

It's not a city builder like Sim City, it's not a life sim like Sims, it's not a survival/crafting game like Don't starve and it's not an econ sim like Industry Giant. It's a little bit of everything, but Anno on a micro scale might be a pretty fitting description.

You basically start the game with a few settlers and various resources/buildings established. You do not have ANY goals, your only goal is to survive and thrive. To do that you're going to build houses, establish an economy and "produce" new settlers.

That means cutting wood, gathering/hunting/harvesting food, so your citizens won't starve to death, creating building materials, chopping firewood, so your citizens won't freeze to death during winter, and carefully establishing houses and increasing your population, so your city won't simply die out. Blacksmiths create tools for your citizens to work with, trade posts let you trade materials, etc.

All in all there is a lot to do. You need to balance your need for expansion with a sustainable economy. If you have too many citizens and not enough of them producing food, then your city will simply starve, which will usually lead to a chain reaction of you losing the game, since dying citizens can't produce more food, but if you take too many citizens away from other production like fire wood, hunting, tailoring or anything concerned with blacksmithing, you will have other issues to contend with. The game can spiral out of control quickly, which is what makes it appealing, I guess. The larger your city grows, the more sprawling your infrastructure becomes, the more challenging the game gets.

I would also definitely recommend the Colonial mod, which opens up the game immensely with new buildings.

Not so great stuff: The UI could need improvements, several buildings share "jobs", so it's a bit finnicky to assign citizens to a specific building. It's also very hard to see dependencies of buildings. You want to build X, but you don't realize that you need to produce Y first...only having icons is not so great. Apart from that I don't have many complaints.

Now the obligatory game report:

Started my city, everything went pretty well, produced food en masse, unfortunately did not realize that my citizens were getting too old, so my 40 peeps city went down to below 30 pretty quickly. Thankfully my Banished were still in a happy mood and procreated happily. Still that took over 10 years or so, then my food supplies started dwindling, all the while my old guys kept dying, and I still could not make all my children work...damn it. Vicious cycle. After having burnt through about 6,000 units of food (a lot) I almost got back on track, but then my city was ravaged by a disease. I was able to erect a hospital in time and got that under control as well. After that things started to go smoothly again. I played for about 31 years, then I got "bored".

Banished is a great game, but lacks longevity, unless you are content to just simply sand box your way for hours upon hours. Still, I liked it and getting 5 hours out of it for a product on sale makes it worth it to me :D

Freaking love this game. It's great for hardcore and casual players alike. Pretty graphics, enjoyable music, dynamic gameplay options and mod support equal for a long and rewarding experience.

a lot of fun. beautiful art style.

the game is really nice but ..... they need to stop dying after first winter