Banished

If you’re a fan of God games and have found yourself disappointed by recent entries in the genre, such as the latest SimCity and the Early Access version of Peter Molyneux’s underwhelming Godus project, then you owe it to yourself to pick up this game.

A classical city-building game where you help a group of settlers to build a new home for themselves. That's Banished in a nutshell. In a surprising twist, the game doesn't feature any combat at all, but I personally didn't even miss it because after all it's a peaceful game where the main focus is planning your town's future and not fighting against evil aliens. Even though Banished was made by just one man, it feels really polished. In particular, the interface is really well done. Of course, no game is perfect and Banished has some issues. The biggest of them all is that there are no objectives or end goals so you can never really win or lose. [March 2014]

Banished reinforces the human drama with its brutal difficulty and negative feedback loops. It's fertile soil for some of the most remarkable emergent storytelling around.

This tough city builder takes you and your capital delightfully serious, but thinking logically and rationally. Once you figure out the system, the game unfortunately loses its challenge though.

Banished is a good city builder game that needs some refinements, but still has a charming atmosphere and interesting ideas.

Banished, as it stands now, looks like a game from Steam Early Access rather than a finished product.

What really kills Banished for me is the overwhelming sense of pointlessness. There are no goals, no scenarios, no unlockables, no longterm luxury goods or endgame wonders or upper level populations or advanced buildings. There is no finale. There is, instead, a world without end.

One of the best city building games I have ever played. Hard to learn at first but when you do times fly.

Smorila me posle nekog vremena, kad krenes ispocetka sve je kul i fun ali ono vremenom nemas nista da radis pa smara ali zasluzuje 7.

Banished is a relatively well-made game, polished enough for release, but a bit limited when it comes to content. There are no real goals or milestones in the base game, so some players may get bored easily.. The modding community manages to prop it up a bit, but there's only so much they can do. I would say it's price tag is accurate and when on sale, even better.

Ok, ok - I get it - a game created by 1 person. And it may feel like a very good product/showreel of this person's skills. I really can't agree with people saying it can compete with strategies created by bigger developers. IT CAN'T. Games are not about quality/people involved ratio, games are about overall final product. Banished has decent game mechanics and the game is simple enough that these few rules give a clarity that can really engage the player. It's a breath of classic-style strategies - no rocket science complexity, just some basic rules to follow and master. The thing is - there is not much to master, and the game lacks any objective and does not give sense of fulfillment. First few hours may really feel good as you have to learn how the settlement works, but then - it's gone. You only have to expand, rearrange buildings a bit, get new territories so you won't run out of resources to create tools (needed for people to work) and so on and on... Not really much of a challenge left. I enjoyed it for ~12 hours, first 2 settlements were a trial and error playground, and with the third one I got everything right... And in any solid strategy game this is the moment when your base prospers well and you expect some kind of milestone or next Tier buildings/mechanics/challenges to come up, but... nothing's gonna happen here. Apart from these gameplay aspects, the game looks... not really appealling, sounds and music are only correct.

I really loved the game for the first day or two. I was constantly playing it. But somewhere along the line, you'll come across game-breaking glitches that completely destroy whatever you've spent 10-15 hours building up. Disasters, harsh weather, uneven building space is all fine. But people that idle when you tell them to build, builders that gather materials when they should be building, and people teleporting to the edge of the map and dying on their way back make this game not worth playing.