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.