Banished

Think of it as a kind of rural Sim City with the difficulty ramped up and no nuclear power plants to lay down. It’s a game that tests your abilities as a pioneer to make it in a world where people need food to survive and if you don’t deliver they’ll die.

Banished challenges you to give your best and if you provide, it will reward. Perhaps you need to be a bit of a masochist to enjoy the game, but it is easily the most fun I have had in a sandbox city builder in a long time.

With resource management at its core this medieval village-builder is a sure alternative to the likes of Sim City.

As a pure city-building game, Banished is dazzling. It combines simple charms with transparent, complex systemic interactions, and a tough-but-fair difficulty curve.

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]

Still, it’s hard not to see the missed potential within Banished. It’s an excellently crafted city building and survival game, made even more impressive by the fact that it was created by one man.

Banished is a great example of an excellent game created without massive resources. Shining Rock Studios combined well-known solutions with new ideas that generate hours of interesting and very demanding gameplay set in a likeable world. Creating and expanding your own settlement provide tons of fun, and giving food and shelter to your subjects is extremely satisfying. Banished is one of the nicest surprises of the year so far.

A single developer did a far better job with Banished than the whole team of Maxis with Sim City. Yes, there are still some things missing, like upgrades or more buildings, but there will be mod tools for the community.

Banished is both challenging and addictive, and allows you to create your own unique medieval society.

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.

Powered by a single developer, Banished is a unique city-builder game with a strong sandbox component. Deep and technically well done, is a recommended purchase for all fans of the genre.

If I didn't know better, I probably wouldn't be able to tell Banished's all the more impressive solo-dev origins. It achieves everything it set out to do and has no real weaknesses. Also, 20 Euros is a fair asking price for a complex city-building survival-sim that knows full well how challenging and enjoyable it can be to start out small. If you need quests, missions or declared goals in your sims, this is not for you. Everyone else: Enjoy! Winter is coming and the children are starving.

While the genre can be difficult to get into due to clunky interfaces, obtuse or cryptic instructions, and infuriating citizen behaviors, Banished offers a fairly intuitive take on things and it’s also easy on the eyes.

A city builder with small maps and a limited number of buildings that manages to be a great game thanks to the extraordinary balance of all its elements required to make big settlements: basically has everything a game of this kind must have, and also something more.

Past the steep learning curve and trial-and-error gameplay of Banished lies a methodically crafted labor of love that is as precise as it is thrilling.

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.

Unfortunately there's a lot of fiddly menus that don't always make things easy. [June 2014, p.78]

First hours with Banished are very enjoyable, but when the town starts functioning like clockwork, the game loses its appeal, because it's short of features – there’s no campaign here, no scenarios. [04/2014, p.68]

Banished is a rare technical achievement, pure in design and of purpose. Its many deaths almost always feel fair, and the battle up to self-sufficiency is gripping. But the absence of a long game beyond this early toil makes it hard to find reasons to settle down here, except for the views, especially if you’ve established yourself on these frosty plains before.

It is an entertaining title that offers some freshness... but that will soon run out if it is not completed with new content to grant a bit more variety. An interesting option for those who love simulation and management games, with a pretty reasonable price that makes it even a more desirable offer. A must buy just if we can assume it will be updated in the future.

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

A nice change of pace for city-builders, but it loses momentum once the immediate urgency of survival goes away.

Banished is like the quiet kid in school: unassuming, down-to-earth but also filled with hidden depths. If you're looking for a no-nonsense city builder that demands you keep a handle on important things like food, warmth and how much beer your citizens have. Once you've figured out the basic mechanics, Banished's appeal can dip slightly but there remains something weirdly engrossing about watching the seasons pass.

Life on the frontier wasn't pretty and neither is Banished, but it does provide an interesting city-building simulation with an excellently designed user interface.

A solid city builder that will appeal to most fans of the genre even if it's currently lacking in features and scope.

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

An interesting twist on the concept of a tycoon game that falls short of its ambition. [Issue #240]

A picturesque city-building strategy game by a one-man developer team only, which mixes complex city-building features with brutal struggle for survival. Banished will initially flog you, then blow your mind. However, it will bore you eventually.

I liked playing Banished. It was complex, but never fiddly, difficult, but rarely cruel, though it would benefit from a little more transparency. But as soon as I had a handle on it, as soon as I'd started to see through some of the fog of its complexity, I wanted to grasp for something bigger, something greater. Banished is satisfying, but never spectacular. That's not quite enough for me.

If you put the lack of missions aside as a consequence of the budget price tag, Banished is still a flawed game. There's brilliant concepts and a core that shines, but a troublesome interface and a general lack of breadth of content is clearly an issue.