Banished

Oldie but goodie! A comfort pick for me. Even though there are now many games like this one out there, I find I always come back home to Banished for a spell.

Still the best resource-oriented town building game I've ever played. Love this gem.

there is no real progress after u get the hang of it and unlocked everything by trading. citizens dont upgrade like in anno. its fun at first but after 8h i have everything unlocked and dont see a point in further play. all i can do is just incease my population and production by building the same things over and over. i played on medium, maybe increased chance of random disasters is more fun but it seems like it simply would slow down progress

I've been playing this game for many years now and, after checks notes 285(!) hours, I finally decided to turn off my mods and subject myself to vanilla Banished once again. And honestly? It's not too bad. I'm going for the achievements right now (you can't earn achievements with mods on) and it's tough but worthwhile, I think. Top tier game. I play it in my downtime and it's really easy to just sink hours into it without realising.

Absolutely love this game. Bought it upon release and still come back to it once a year or so for a play through.

One of a kind game, and can't quite find anything else that matches the gameplay. Lot's of fun, very relaxing, highly recommended.

Terrible game. Very difficult to guide the townsfolk and they seem to consume more than they produce. A fairy pointless game ending in disappointment time and again. Little to no pay off. Absolutely not worth playing if it were free and since I payed, I certainly feel i was robbed.

This game is a good balance of fairly difficult and easy to master as far as city builders go. No matter how long its been since I played, I find myself drawn back to it - making unnecessarily large villages. Its challenging and requires focus but calming and helps me sleep at night. Great fun.

I've played a lot of city builders and all have more features. Banished is so much more simple and a balancing act where need enough tools clothes and houses and especially food for people. As it grows outward until if mess up the balance and the houses are to far from their jobs and not enough tools to speed them up everything implodes and a death spiral of starvation kicks in. They all to busy starving to bring in the crops and eat them. Sounds bad i know, but it totally your fault for not planning ahead properly and not keeping an eye on production. Not that every merchant for years only had seeds you already had and really needed to trade for food

Having said that can see the DNA of banished in so many games that came after and a good game should get harder as you get further in. Plus so hooked there so many things i should be doing than restarting Banished, but i probably will XD

I still come back and play this one whenever I am looking for a city builder. AI on the workers can be iffy, but you know, real life people too.

I love this game highly recommended if you seek time to kill, there are plenty of mods and tutorials around to get what you want.

I love this game. One of my favourite builders, a bit old (would love to see a remake/remaster), can get very challenging in the late-game.

TLDR: It's a casual city builder but it still holds up in 2024 as a cozy, low system-requirement timesink.

PC Review + Steam Deck Impressions

Great game! Challenging at times, but not too hard to get started. Decent workshop content to keep things fresh.

Hi, it is very awkward, tricky game, noticed that over 15 years of living the game unexpectedly begun eliminate your tough gained citizens (workers) and this is main problem, this game is not easy, tricky and unstable, I try to cope with that but how long...? Any game should be enjoyable.

fantastic; manor lords but 10 years earlier and much more intimate (one city to rule them all instead of a bunch of cities and such)

This is one of the greatest civilization building games out there. It's so easy to pick up because there are no complicated rules. Your people are easy to keep happy (I assume it's because they're recently banished from their home). It's so easy to lose hours in this game and love every second of it.

OK foundation but limited. Single developer so only as much effort as one person can put into it and eventually abandoned.

Short of it is that there are only like 15 building types, a couple of crop and ranch options, no tower defense against bandits or wildlife ... just sort of plain. Got old, super fast. Way better and deeper titles and builders just like this, such as Stranded: Alien Dawn, Ixion, Endzone, Frostpunk, Surviving Mars, etc.

A far more casual take on the management/city builder type of game. Its fine I suppose but I found it extremely limiting. Once you build every building there is not much more to do besides watching the numbers go up like some sort of clicker game. Personally, the game needs more events similar to its natural disasters to have it go beyond that casual relaxing hole it is in. Again, if that is what it is going for then this is a good one of those but it just got boring really quickly really fast. Still, on sale and if you are looking for casual city building then this one is for you.

Banished 2.0. The only game better than this. Kiwiportraits

One of my fist settlement builders. Great game.

Great, simple game. The replay value can be somewhat limited when you figure everything out, but it is a beautiful and peaceful game.

Played since release day - never got around to posting a review but I have enjoyed it. It's a relaxing game with a little bit of mild panic when you first start - must feed the people!

This is still a fun game to play, if you like survival/farming games, thanks to the many mods that add fresh content.

Relaxing game, really enjoyable to play. The gameplay is logical and smooth, but also requires constant attention, especially at the beginning of a new save. After 200–300 inhabitants, the game becomes quite repetitive, especially after buying every seed type. But since it is possible to mod it, you can add content for the late game and correct that issue. For me, that's one of "If I had to keep only one videogame while on a desert island" type of game.

Possibly the best of its kind. It hasn't been updated in years but maybe it doesn't need it

It's fine and good while you're working out how things work. Then you've got a village that has everything it needs and all you can do is sit there and wait while the number of residents creeps upwards, gradually building more of the same. There's no particular challenge in just doubling up all the services in a village to cater for a slightly higher population, so it loses interest pretty quickly.

The game is great for relaxation when you are stressed TF out. It is a haven away from the world. A release from the matrix. However it also has an internal issue that doesn't seem to be resolved. It doom Zooms and locks the scroll. I can't figure out how to fix it. If anyone knows, please hit me up and let me know how to stop it or fix it. I am playing on a laptop. *so no (center scroll) mouse.

Appalachia simulator.

It's a very cozy game.

Wonderful experience to watch the townsfolk slowly grow and change. I really enjoy the challenge since you'r really only in charge of assigning jobs and dictating when to harvest some things. I will say this, the hard mode sometimes has an issue where no one shows up to the town hall for months or years and the kids take quite a long time to grow up if you educate them, but if you don't their just so inefficient. I did so much work on my last run, just to have my population slowly die off of old age, which is normally what you want. I was struggling to fill jobs, and then a tornado hit and the run was basically unsavable with how many people that died. I know hard mode is meant to be a little more heartless, but maybe tweak it so there's another way to get people or make them show up slightly more often. I've had several runs where, through no fault of my own, my population dwindles and then some natural disaster hits (this time it was a tornado that killed 8 people.) I had no almost no adults left to do anything and they would've died from the cold since winter was right around the corner, which means the kids definitely would've died.

A great game for relaxing and spending some spare time. Love the game!

So, I’ve been totally hooked on this game "128 hours".
It's like a real-life test to see if you've got what it takes to build a thriving community from scratch. The thing I love most is how it throws you right into the deep end. You've got to deal with crazy weather, food shortages, and all sorts of unexpected challenges. It's super stressful, but also super rewarding when you manage to pull through.
The graphics are pretty decent, and they definitely fit the whole medieval vibe. I do wish there were more options for customizing buildings, though. It would be cool to be able to really make your town unique.
Overall, Banished is a super fun and addictive game that'll keep you coming back for more. If you're into city-building and love a challenge, you should definitely give it a try!

Wonderful mechanics, is open to any type of city-management style from players and has a top-tier modding community that can independently build onto the base game, which is already fantastic by itself. Easy to lose track of time while playing. I highly recommend this game to anyone, even those who are not interested in city-builders.

Adorable little village sim so addictive it's baffling. At a glance it seems simple and, at first, it is. But as your village grows, so does its needs and the larger it gets, the more difficult those needs are to balance. Run out of iron without a plan or way to get more in a timely manner and you could face a cascade of consequences that threaten to wipe out your entire civilization. Use up all the logs in storage on construction projects and you aren't producing enough to cover your heating fuel needs? Who knows how many will freeze to death over the coming winter..... Allow a group of nomads to join without assessing your food stores? ..... Oh look, a tornado..... All the while the most relaxing lute background music you have ever heard lulls you into a false sense of calm and security.

One of my favorite settlement survival games that I come back to from time-to-time. You start out with a small village (or practically nothing on the hard mode) and have to figure out how to secure resources for your banished settlers. When you reach the maximum of constructing buildings, the world becomes your oyster and can explain as much as you want. The mods that the community makes are pretty amazing too where you can have a bigger map, more resources, or you can play a very casual mode to have no stress and build whatever your creativity can imagine.

A fun city-builder type game where balancing expansion and resources gets very tricky very fast. Be prepared to lose a lot while learning how to balance things.

While Banished can be punishing, that punishing nature feeds a really rewarding sense of accomplishment when you realize you've built a stable society that not only can survive the winter without people dying, but is able to grow and build extravagant things like bridges that are way too long.

Peaceful, relaxing and slow burning civ-builder. But when it all turns to custard... it turns fast. The perfect scale and perfect pace.

this game just isn't deep enough to warrant chasing the achievements, and without the achievements it's difficult to suggest you'd have any particular goals that aren't self imposed

I enjoyed the Vanilla game. It was a lot of fun. Having the workshop with all the mods too. I love it

Honestly pretty disappointed with this game. I thought it would have adequate content for playing a pretty long time. Instead it felt like I had seen and done everything in the first 3-4hrs. There is no campaign, no scenarios or objectives. Which would have been fine if it had new technologies to research or upgrade paths to take. But not even that. So there is no sense of progression. Game gets very repetitive after the initial hurdles are passed.
It might get more challenging at higher populations but the lack of a sense of progression and repetitiveness still remains.

Alrighty, so ignore my playtime, I once had this game pirated for a few hundred hours but bought it to support the dev and because its truly worth buying

Buy it full price? YES- It is worth it, despite the apparent simplicity it is a game youll take a lot of time to master and experiment with and understand. The late game is practically a new game with how much planning is required for a good settlement

This game is all the work of one dev and he put together a masterpiece. Buy this game, and bless this game. 10/10 for what it is. ESPECIALLY WITH MODS

it is a lot of fun, nice simulator from an indie company. it is quite straight forward and does a lot of fun.

Ah Banished....
Banished is one of those games that I kind of fell into by accident. In the past I'd enjoyed complex and unique city builders like Frostpunk or Oxygen not included (if you can call that a city builder??) but here was Banished.
Simple graphics, simple premise, simple mechanics yet endlessly entertaining.
Banished is exactly what is says on the tin and, I for one, love that. There's no tech tree, no linear path/story and definitely no military to be seen. Every worker feels vital to the survival of your city (the excellent AI definitely helps this) and every element of gameplay is finely tuned so you can min-max or play casually to your hearts desire.
Its one of those easy to learn hard to master games and despite my 50 odd hours of gameplay, I have yet to earn even a single achievement. And if that hasn't sold you, the modding support for this relatively old game is still up and running. Getting bored? Install a mod and revamp the mechanics or the style.
Overall I would definitely recommend Banished to anyone that is a fan of the city builder genre and looking for a no-fail classic to fall back on.

TL:DR:
- Simple yet finely tuned mechanics.
- Easy to learn, hard to master.
- Modding support.
- Good AI systems
- Actual production chain logistics (not creating materials out of thin air)

My all-time favorite city-builder. The Colonial Charter mod is a testament to the human spirit.

RTS Civ builder resource management where it is you against the elements. Settings allow you to make this as easy or challenging as you wish. Is there room for improvement? Of course and I hope that they release new editions or a sequel soon. Improvements that I would like to see include: Globe world map, tech upgrades, and both LAN and online multiplayer options with chat features. This is a really good game that has the potential to be truly great!

Chill game, mods make it better

Nice buildel game - not too easy not too hard. nice lovely world.

great game mods help a lot with building creativity

I think my playtime speaks for itself. Better with mods though, as it's quite lacking in the long run. Can be difficult to get into and learn, but once you do you'll have a much easier and relaxed experienced than in games like Frostpunk, which also have brutal survival mechanics.