Banished

Very addictive and replayable. Lots of cool mods!

Great game, especially for how old it is. Lots of great mods to choose from to give the game some more depth/utility. Shame a sequel was never made.

Banished is one of my all-time favorite video games, any genre or time period or platform. It's simple enough: resource management, town building, and a steep difficulty curve, but it was enough to spawn countless imitators and clones, all trying to emulate the tight game design, beautiful aesthetics, and "simple but complex" gameplay.

Banished really excels at allowing you as the player to tinker and experiment. Most players, even with guides, will not survive the first five years on their first several playthroughs. Earning the mid-tier achievements is a goal that lies beyond where a lot of people will give up. Real mastery of Banished takes intensive time and effort, and even then, success is not guaranteed--but you have to poke around and try things for a while to get there, and that kind of game is what keeps people like me coming back.

I was recommended this game many years ago now, and in that time, I always seem to return. If you enjoy strategic management of resources, town builders, sharp learning curves, or striking visuals--all simple but wildly challenging--this is a game worth trying.

Solid city builder. The endgame is a bit repetitive but the initial objective of getting to a population of 100 with full education, good health and no starvation is fun and challenging.

This game is amazingly thought-through. It has a lot of complexity, but it's not overloaded. Supports a lot of mods, and I definitely recommend checking out the mod community, as the base game is a bit limited.

The gameplay is wonderful, though! This game has served as an inspiration for dozens of games that came after. I've tried multiple, but I keep coming back to this one, because it's just so good (despite a few limitations, as the game is 10 years old already).

a simulation strategic builder game that doesn't send you to war or make you tap tap your way through the game. I enjoy setting a few changes and building a few more of something and then let time flow so I can see the changes improve or destroy the township.

This game is a great city sim. The perfect amount of challenge.

Absolutely love city builders, even though they could be sometimes quite frustrating depending on mechanics for particular representatives of genre. So as one of examples, there were some not perfectly implemented things in Banished too.

In almost every aspect game is exactly as every other city builder - making homes, infrastructure, resource gathering and production buildings, trading, etc. Indirect people control or rather human resources management is same as well. Which is one of frustrating issues here... when there is disease outbreak your pops will travel all around multiple villages you made, dodging all the hospitals you built to combat the disease and continue to carry it for undetermined length of time, making sure that plague still lives after most of it was eradicated, also it'd take just a little bit of chance to have it reappear again from that one traveling idiot devastating your population.

Graphics are far from marvel, but serviceable enough. Don't remember encountering any models glitching or stuff like that, but could easily have missed that, as there are lots of things to track.

Audio might be a bit of an oof, music gets very repetative in my opinion and annoying enough to turn it off completely, with sfx staying fine.

Can't really recall if there is any plot, maybe there were separate scenarios with it, but zilch in main "campaign".

a time filler and as challenging as you choose to make it. lots of great mods in the workshop as well.

The field is getting more crowded, but this is still GOAT to me. Mods are really a must.

Even with the game being a decade old, this is still the best city-building strategy game out there. Even better than Settlement Survival in my opinion, which has been abandoned in development.

Starting a new game might be challenging to most new players but once you've mastered the basics of survival, you'll have no problem. All you have to do is balance out your citizens needs and materials.

I recommend watching a YouTube tutorial for those who have trouble surviving the first couple years.

Overtime it can get repetitive, but there are many mods available to make this game re-playable.

Recommend: 10/10

Good to save, Good graphics, Can change difficulty easy to hard. Needs to improve how bartering works.

Banished is a city-building survival game that throws you into the harsh realities of managing a small group of exiles, forcing you to balance resources, weather, and an ever-growing population. Unlike traditional city builders, there's no money—only people and the goods they produce, making every decision feel meaningful.

The Good
✅ Deep, Rewarding Gameplay – Every choice matters. If you mismanage food, forget to stockpile firewood, or grow too fast, your town will collapse. It’s a true test of strategic planning.
✅ Relaxing Yet Tense – The game’s slow pace and beautiful, rustic aesthetic make for a chill experience—until winter comes and your food stocks run dry.
✅ No Hand-Holding – You learn by doing (or failing). There’s a great sense of accomplishment when you finally build a thriving, self-sufficient village.

The Bad
❌ Brutal Learning Curve – Early mistakes can doom you, and the game doesn’t explain much. Expect to lose a few towns before getting the hang of it.
❌ Lack of Late-Game Depth – Once you’ve stabilized, there’s little to do beyond optimizing production chains. No grand end goals beyond survival.
❌ UI & Micromanagement Issues – The UI is functional but clunky, and managing large populations can feel tedious.

If you love challenging survival city-builders with a focus on realism, Banished is a must-play. It’s punishing but rewarding, and there's nothing quite like watching your tiny village grow into a bustling town. Just be ready for a few heartbreaks along the way.

Banished - A City Builder for the Patient and Persistent ⭐⭐⭐⭐(4/5)

Worth it on a major sale otherwise its a very basic game that has been abandoned for a long time. Fun and basic but gets old fast with no sort of endgame whatsoever. For 5 dollars I would get it.

This game may not have the most up to date graphics but it is truly challenging, and for some. it is addictive. The trick is to build your original inhabitants into the size community that suits you. There is no warfare but lots of management and strategy. You can play vanilla or use the many mods. Have a go at reaching the various achievements in vanilla. Tougher than you thought, hey? I've played for nearly 1K hours and will definitely play for at least 1K more. Worth every cent. Highly recommended.

I liked the constant balancing of resources and structure. For myself, I prefer a game where I have a role play element (that is, I am playing a character in the game). In this one, the citizens of my town are faceless and completely interchangeable for the most part. I ended up playing until my town was past 300 citizens, and felt like that was enough for me.

Waste of money.. game is broken and AI is terrible. Could be good, but trips on being so difficult that it's agonizing to play more than an hour. Thrown on trash pile of wasted money.

Great city/village building game, and it gets much better with mods.

play the games with mods if you wanna have fun and relax, or don't the guides are amazing in the community hub

A true classic. This game spawned an entire genre of survival town builders, and none of them have quite hit the sweet spot of the original.

The game has you managing a town on the edge of starvation largely through choosing what to build and how to assign jobs. The townspeople control themselves, which can become an issue when food is running low and the little pricks start hoarding food in their own houses instead of utilizing the efficient supply chain you carefully worked out.

Banished is a both a great "just one more thing" game and an object lesson in microeconomics. Still the best in the genre a decade later.

Straight forward city builder, very relaxing music, all around good game to put a few hundred hours into.

An old game but still one of the best city builders out there, MODs make it re-playable time and time again.

Pretty fun and fairly challenging, especially in the beginning of a run. If you are into city builders and sims, it's worth a try.

If your dream is to build a mega city of thousands of citizen, that probably isn't gonna work, however. The game starts to lag considerably approaching high population (600+). This and the lack of endgame buildings and upgrades does limit what you can do as you cannot really expand endlessly.

The achievements are overall simple, but do take time. Personally got 100% in 60 hours.

Brilliant building game which i keep coming back to.

Very simple game easy to run on a basic laptop. Very fun survival theme.

love the game. it has great ambiance and i love the terrain generation, giving new challenges which each map. very cozy.

Banished is a relaxing game where you can lose yourself in building and growing your city or village. With tons of mods to enhance the experience, it’s easy to get hooked and enjoy endless hours of fun!"

Banished is easy to learn and not so basic that each step is tedious. With changes to landscape and weather and difficulty it can be interesting even after many plays,

Insane how much interest and fun can be packed into a game that totals fewer than 5 gigabytes.

It requires a plan and is not too easy, as setting up a new life in exile would naturally be like.

How did I forget to review this game? No one to fight but starvation and population issues. Keep building houses. Plan out where your forested areas will be. Get a trading post and figure out how to trade food for stone, iron. When wood is aplenty, firewood is good for trading for stone/iron when food trade is not possible for it.

If you want a resource management game that is both fun and can be challenging, here you go! Too challenging? Download some of the options to get more resources.

Fun game. Just fun overall.

despite having a learning curve fatter than my ass, this game is a lot of fun! very chill after you get the hang of it

Banished is a great city management game for the beginning strategist. With informative tutorials, simple navigation, and an in-game 'help' menu, the game play is clear and easy to understand. Graphics look great and work well on my old laptop computer.
If I were to add to the game, I'd ask for further upgrades in materials and buildings. Once a city has been established, the progress can feel stagnant, as if being left without a goal.
Overall, great purchase. I've gotten twenty fulfilling hours out of this game, and I'm only on my first settlement!

its cool you build a little village they are pretty dumb which makes it harder but its cool its a bit enraging some days but its also very time consuming

Banished is a simple game that defines a genre of survival city builders. So many other games out there described themselves as "Banished but...[insert slightly different game mechanic or setting]". This is it. This is the original. You can mod in more building types and more resource types, but at the end of the day, the game as it was originally designed is both simple and complex in its own unique way that'll take your thriving population and crush it.

I bought this one on a recommendation and it's one of the few recommended games that actually held up - if not outperformed - what early feedback said about it. If you're into medieval open world kind of games, this one is pretty good. It's got a lot of grind in a fairly immersive and sorta relaxing way.

absolutely love this game its super relaxing and a great economy management game love resource management games then youll love this one! it also has a fully supported built in mod tab super simple to us and play with!!

Every new medieval city builder that comes out i look at it and say "i wish it was like banished". Now i realised i dont want new games, i just want banished. It ruined my life. I love it.

Just an interesting game to play. Great if you like city or civilization building type games. Requires engagement when playing, can get "exciting" quickly.

This game is fun, but can be difficult. highly recommend if you enjoy resource management.

I really enjoyed this game for the time I put into it, and I stopped playing when I felt there wasn't anymore that I wanted to get out of it. But what I did get, I enjoyed.

Fun but bit buggy. All of my games end with citizens doing little work

This is a fun and relaxing game. There are a lot of great mods for it, too.

This Game is a time waster. But a good one.
Every time I played this game, new problems were presented to me to ensure a continuing challenge.
The aesthetics and graphics of the game are beautiful and have aged well for a game that is over 10 years old it has aged well.
I have definitely got value for money with this purchase.

Not sure what happened, Not sure if the very last update this game got broke something. I tried to manage a small village but when trying to build anything, nothing was working. Builders were not building. Can not progress through anything. Seems to be in a broken status/un-playable.

I love coming back to banished time after time, and setting up a new little city on a new map. It remains fun from the initial years through later optimizations. And I like prioritizing different things, like some cities are locked into grids, or using wide paths for aesthetics.

a classic in the survival city builder genre, it has a few problems and the idea has been improved upon by new titles, like any classic, but still good to experience and fun to come back to.

Simply the best colony sim there is especially with the mega mod!

The game is fun at first but then you start to hit roadblocks and pitfalls that completely derail progression. I was looking for a nice chill city builder which this one can be but where it falls flat is how confusing and poorly explained a lot of mechanics are.

• Stone is the IRL equivalent to mining oil. I have no idea why the devs decided to make that resource so rare but as I was playing every issue amounted to running out of stone. The solution you'd think would be to build a quarry to generate stone passively but no.. Quarry's cannot be deleted and if you place one every single villager will have crippling depression and never repopulate.

• There's such janky placement regarding mines. They have to be placed near mountains which is fine but they don't snap on as they should leading to some frustration regarding the generated maps as some of them have a mountain placed very far away or some are flat out unusable.

• The issues and problem solving start to get repetitive in a bad way. If I run out of stone the only way to replenish it is by buying from a dock trader but they might not always sell stone. The game does allow mods that buff resource gains but still even with iron, wood and stone buffed I still couldn't generate enough stone to stop my villagers from completely giving up on life.

It's fun starting out because of how chill it is but I can't recommend this game when majority of my time playing was spent looking up how things are supposed to work vs being able to figure things out naturally.

Fun, simple little town-building survival sim. I've been playing it for years. :)