Reviews

• gamedeal user

  May 5, 2023

  One could argue this game started a revolution in the genre. It still holds up because the mechanics are at the core of thousands of titles that have been released since. I would suggest Banished to someone just starting with city builders. Figure out what you really like about the genre and go from there. You like building cities? Cities Skylines. You like the environment? Farthest Frontier. You like the mechanics but don't like the grid layout? Foundations. You like logistics? any Anno title really. You just want a modern Banished? Settlement Survival. ..on Mars? Surviving Mars. ..on a space ship? Space Haven. And that's just my library. Worth full price unless the aged graphics bother you. Consider grabbing it on sale, though, it's a classic.
• gamedeal user

  Jun 7, 2017

  I think after getting 100% achievements and sinking countless hours into this game I could write few words.

  Map Seeds: Map generation changed a little in past 2 years so most old seeds generate something else. Because of this I am going to leave 2 map seeds that should make it possible to get all achievements in 2017: Mountain Men: Mountains, Small - 685285880 (1.0.6) Everything else: Valleys, Large - 19569742 (1.0.7) I put almost 700 hours into this small game, considering I got the game in sale for $9 few years ago, that's quite good deal however about 600 of these hours went into heavily modified version of banished known as Colonial Charter.

  Vanilla Banished

  I am not going to write elaborate review as the game is over 3 year old and there's already 20k of them. Banished as stand alone game is really nice looking time sink with relaxing music for maybe about 20 - 50 hours more if you are trying to get all all achievements. Game start roughly and if you don't know how to play it's quite possible you will lose everything really fast. This also scares few of my friends from playing but the moment you learn game everything becomes really easy and only challenge are RNG disasters that can be turned off such as tornados, disease, fire or orchard infestation. There's many guides and banished wikia contains calculator for optimal field, orchard, graveyard or pasture size turning the game into relaxing simulation instead of challenge. *You can only earn achievements in unmoded version.

  Modded Banished

  This is where I put most of my hours. Currently the best mods you can get is Colonial Charter + Megamod. Don't look in the workshop instead, google their site for instruction and direct download. I heard The North is really nice mod but I didn't had time to check it out. I admit I feel like even with Adam & Eve - which is supposedly hardest start, starting just with 2 people, buildings in CC makes everything easier than original. Some might think of it as negative but honestly I think it just turn banished into sim city builder with many production chains and nicer visuals thanks to the variety and decoration CC brings. CC + Megamod adds many new maps, buildings, decorations, animals, plans and so on that it expand the game many times over. The decorations and customized sets such as docks make it worth alone. If you are looking for more simulation and less survival I would recommend starting with already modded game. My largest problem with the game Performance - Game starts to hang out at +10 speed when your population start to hit certain number of people. In my case it's around 800 to 1200, then I slow game to +5 or +2. However in these large half map covering cities that speed is almost impossible to work on as everything takes ages to finish on lower speed when you are trying to maitain and grow city with population so big. I noticed this speed isn't much related to your computer setup as it's to the game. For example I can run FF14 or HotS basically any other game next to banished and there's no lag no delay in them and there's no effect on Banished either. In the end, I do recommended the game modded or not. Both offer quite different experience. One for a few hours of challenge in I think graphically pleasing builder and other for many hours of simulation.
• gamedeal user

  Oct 25, 2014

  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.
• gamedeal user

  Jan 26, 2015

  Banished is a distillation of what a lot of city-building fans missed from newer SimCity games. It’s a smart, fun twist on the concept -- instead of ruling over a metropolis through a mayor’s lens, you play a more intricate role in the development of a small colony. Every citizen is somebody you can see and control (though not directly), and your role is to see that your citizens are well-fed, happy, and warm through the long winters. The result is a more nuanced and satisfying game than the EA flagship franchise which inspired it. Every Banished game starts on a randomly generated map, where you control a small band of settlers (about 10 adults and 10 children) who have ostensibly been banished from wherever they came from. You have nothing but the minimal supplies they carried with them, and the resources of the land around you. Your first objective is to survive the coming winter, which you can do by building houses, creating a source of food (a fishing dock or gatherer’s hut would do), and a source of heat for winter (firewood). All of these things require resources such as lumber, stone, and iron, which your citizens can scrounge from the land around them. After the first winter, your options explode. The basic idea is to increase the population of your town by building homes, while balancing the basic needs of the citizens with the resources required for those needs. Every citizen in your town is a resource as well; the player personally assigns jobs to accomplish every task, and must make sure their labor force is well balanced and not spread too thin. Should the population dip and you no longer have enough farmers, for instance, the consequences can be dire. All of this may sound a little daunting, and it can be, but Banished provides a helpful tutorial at the outset to ease the difficulty curve a bit. I was able to get rolling with my city and survive my first winter with its help. The mechanics are satisfying and relatively deep, although after 20 hours or so I found myself finding a groove and more or less following a formula for increasing the population of my town. It was still fun to see my town sprawl across the map (which can be sizeable), but the gameplay got a bit tired. Banished does come with robust mod support and for those who find themselves growing tired of the gameplay, there is an extensive library of mods which breathe new life into the game. Colonial Charter is a large mod which adds an incredible amount of new content and greatly extends the life of Banished. It’s great to see mod support for a game like this, and it’s a shining example of why we should see more mod support for games going forward. Overall, I’d recommend Banished to anyone pursuing that city simulation itch, but finding themselves disappointed with recent EA offerings. Populations of your city won’t rocket into the millions, but the level of control and visibility into the workings of the simulation is very satisfying. It’s a game which, while probably inspired by games like SimCity, does plenty to establish itself in this genre with new ideas.
• gamedeal user

  Jul 7, 2015

  ├ Digitals Review 👌🏻 ┤

  Game Pros • Challenging • Excellent AI • Beautiful graphics • Everything unlocked from the start ("Banished is not about forcing challenges on players, but a city builder that lets you do what you want, in whatever order you wish" - Developer) • Natural Disasters (Fires, Tornados, and so on. This feature can be disabled) • Clean and simple main menu and user interface • Includes all seasons and weather • Tons of things to build and keep watch over • Ton of different jobs for villagers to be assigned to (Blacksmith, Tradesman, Farmer, Teacher, Hunter, and so on) • Your decesions can bring you brutal punishments. And possibly the death of everyone. Game Cons • Lacks resource control • Needs more variety on background music and ambient sounds Relateable Games • Sim City • City Skylines

  Conclusion

  Banished is one of my favorite Town/Village/City building games. Without the influence and preassure on companies that make Triple A titles, this game is crafted beautifully, and has a better connection with the community. If you want a challenging, and addicting city/village/town building game, I would highly reccomend picking this one up.

  Score

  85/100 (If you found this review helpful, consider giving it a thumbs up!)
• gamedeal user

  Sep 17, 2015

  After over 100 hours of playing it is definitely time that I write a review for this game. I bought Banished on a whim during the summer sales, I played lots of Sim City 2000 during my childhood and I was after another game like that but of course at the time Cities Skylines was out of my budget, so after a bit of YouTube research I added this to my games collection. When I started my first village I was completely lost, in fact my first four or five villages were complete failures. This game had a lot to balance up, a constant battle for resources that I always seemed to lose, it was very frustrating at first and I almost abandoned the game with about five hours playtime. I took to YouTube again and learnt the basics of making it through winter and keeping up with farming and eventually I made it past the usual three year mark and got a village that was actually growing and moving forward. With the town in full swing I was able to expand further and further, making smaller communities that would join with marketplaces and eventually with trading ports to bring animals, all leading up to the town hall which is great for prediciting resource consumption, housing needs and allowing the entry of nomads. At this point I was spending almost entire days just tending to my village, I built a huge bridge spanning across a lake to connect up two distant communities and made both self reliant, with each year adding more houses, schools, forester lodges and so on. The problem is that if you don't maintain just one element of your village, the collapse is VERY sudden. One year my sheep got sick and this affected the whole herd, meaning I had to kill them all; in tern this meant that my tailor couldn't make the highest quality coats and since I didn't change the settings to a lower material, I had no coats stockpiled for winter, leading to many of my villagers freezing to death. My newest village is going strong with around 280 citizens but everything lies in the balance, the further you get the more you have to keep track of, but it feels very rewarding to make it through a year without someone starving to death. I have to juggle my farmers around so that once a harvest is finished they are then pushed into the mines and quarries to retrieve resources until spring comes again, if I forget to change that option in time then that causes a huge drop in my food production, so yeah you need to stay on top of everything. My screen is usually covered with all my building objectives that need to be filled and the town hall stats that will show where to put my labourers. That all being said, Banished isn't going to be a game you will return to every week, I could play for days on end at first but now its a bit intimidating returning to my town, that could be because of the stress of it all. The music can get quite repetitive but overall I did really enjoy the soundtrack, very appropriate for the theme of the game, but when you hear the music on start up everytime it can just get you out of the mood of playing, i'd put a playlist of your own on standby if you're going to play for more than two or so hours. I have been lucky to avoid most of the in game disasters unlike other players but that can be toggled to your preference. I agree with some players that there could have been a few more build options on top of what there is, more types of housing is something I would have enjoyed, but i've been playing without any mods so far and haven't felt the need (yet) to go in search for them. Once you get your first successful town, the game is very cosy and its great to have the different map seeds with flat land or valleys to spice things up. You are going to need patience at first that is for sure, look up guides if you get caught in the lag of the first few years and that will help move things forward. The art style is quite detailed for such a small game and the camera feature that lets you cut back and forth to far apart settlements is so useful, in fact many of the shortcuts available make management of the game a lot less stressful as you go along. Banished is a game I would definitely recommend to anyone I know. While it has difficulty options available to you, I would say this game is for people in that middle zone with it being a bit challenging for casual players and maybe lacking that complexity a more hardcore simulator player would prefer. Go watch some videos and add it to your wishlist!
• gamedeal user

  Jul 14, 2014

  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.
• gamedeal user

  Feb 8, 2022

  IT IS A VERY RELAXING AND FUN GAME TO PLAY IT IS A GOOD GAME FOR OLDER PEOPLE TO PLAY I AM 76 YEARS OLD AND ENJOY THIS GAME
• gamedeal user

  Nov 24, 2017

  Very solid, simple City Builder sim with a relatively rough scale of difficulty compared to others of its type and a low-tech Medieval vaguely European setting. It has a problem with progression, in that, well, there isn't much of it. You grow your town and enjoy your town and manage it the best you can. That's it. Which can be more than enough for some people forever, and is enough for some people for a while. I fall into the latter category. I find it to be a rather peaceful experience to come back to every now and again. A bit like tending a garden I suppose. But I wish I could get more out of it at times. Progress the village up to a city with grander works of architecture. Deal with larger threats to the village perhaps. Maybe a system of crime or war or politics or just, something to move on to of interest so I could stay with the game a bit longer once the growth loop is made manageable. So I get bored with it and uninstall when I hit that point. But every year or so I find a moment where I want to relax with a simple game of city management and I find myself reinstalling it, tending my garden for a minute, and enjoying it again. I'd recommend it if you're OK with any of that scenario occurring with yourself.
• gamedeal user

  Feb 19, 2014

  Thinking of buying this game? Well let me help you out with that. First take the time to look at these two youtubers, Start with TotalBiscuit's WTF is ... Banished, still interested? Now take the time to watch quill18's "Let's play : Banished" it has 18 videos of game play for you to sink your mind into. Now that you've taken the time to watch the video's take this into consideration. This game was devoloped by a one man show , Luke Hordorowicz. (Shining Rock Software) He started making this game in Aug. 2011 and in 3 years has made something I have been really enjoying. This game isn't really a city/town builder as it is a survival game. There is no invading hordes, ninja's, bandits or jabba-walkies, but to me it's not needed. Micro managing your town is plenty, for now. There is going to be mod support for this and with the talent I've seen out there I'm sure new buildings and other things you might miss will surely be added. The game itsself does start at a slow pace like most building games. (there is the ability to increase the speed x2, x5, x10) but that can change pretty fast. My first two towns ended up ghost towns from thinking I could afk for 10 mins. Lesson learned. Starvation, disease, fire, etc. will make short work of your town if not ready for it and it willl happen. There is no money in this game, more of a barter system once you set up your trader. Exchanging items your town has crafted for new crop seeds, live stock and other supplies. Finding the balance in your town is key which can be tricky, placing a bunch of houses down and not having food for your new rapid growing town will end poorly. This game isn't meant to be rushed, take time to pause the game and look at your map and plan ahead. There is no winning in Banished only failing. You either find the right groove and keep getting bigger or watch your little towns people turn into compost. Three dificulty levels, I find medium or hard a lot more fun. Random map generator which is nice to see. 3 different map sizes, plus a choice of valleys or mountains. Weather and seasons, and plenty more. In closing I'd like to say the game is worth 19.99$ and honestly I find any game I can spend hours playing on the first day well worth my money. I've bought 60$ games from the big AAA companies and either have them beat in 5-6 hours or lose interest in 30 minutes. This game is going on my favorites list for sure. Thanks for reading, cheers!