Banished

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!!

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.

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. :)

A cute game that's great for relaxing and playing! I like how the map and starting animal changes every time so that it mixes it up a bit!

Honestly on sale this game is worth it if you like managing a population that is routinely on the verge of collapse. It really is not overly complex but can be micromanaged to a degree. You won't optimize ratios like factorio, but they can help if you use them right. There are quite a few mods for the game worth trying also. Once you "get it" then it becomes much easier and you can try new things versus just trying to make it past a single winter.

Nothing made since this game has the simplicity and complexity that this city builder provides. It has given re-playability many years after I beat the game, and has a great low-stress, relaxed pace.

classic of the genre, you'll love this game. Would have loved for the devs to keep working on it :)

Maybe this game was really good 10 years ago, but there are sooo many things about it that feel like "Early Access" rather than a complete product.

1) If you select "Easy" difficulty, you will begin the game with buildings already on the map, but they are not arranged in a manner that makes sense with the current version of the game. I.e., you will need a Marketplace in the center of your town, but the starting buildings don't include or leave space for one.
2) People can clear resources and even clear a space for a building but they can't actually build the building until a nearby stockpile is designated for them to move the cleared resources to the stockpile and back again to the building location. Why does it work this way? I have no idea, the tutorials made no mention.
3) People get cold when they don't have housing to warm up, and them being cold prevents them from constructing the housing. So they freeze to death while the housing remains incomplete.
4) Getting the people to actually do what you want them to do is a challenge. During the warmer months, you will designate for them to construct a boarding house so they have somewhere to warm up when the weather gets cold, but they wander off doing random things or idling for months until the weather turns cold and they die while the housing hardly made any progress.
5) The people age rapidly so that their ages don't actually correspond with the in-game passage of time unless you download a mod that is literally called "one year is one year." Yes, that's right, you literally have to download a mod in order for one year to equal one year.
6) There is no "Game Over" screen. You WILL game over many times while trying to learn this game, but the game doesn't even have the common decency to tell you when literally all your people are dead. Instead, you have to know which option to display your population count in order to see that it's zero and that you should probably start over or find something else to do with your time.

If this was a decade ago, I could probably say this game has a lot of potential, and I REALLY like the premise. But this game feels like it was never actually completed and got all the kinks worked out.

I hope other devs will see the overblown "success" of Banished and eventually give us something that is worth all the hype.

It's boring. It's janky. The AI is goofy. It takes a LOT of getting used to. Sometimes you get decently far into building a town without developing something important and it really bites you.

It's also weirdly therapeutic.

Most of my playtime was on an overheating laptop in a shipping container office in the california desert. It was nice.

After all these years this is still the best city building sim set in medieval times in my opinion. Very cozy, very addicting and quite challenging. Extra love for soundtrack as well. Cannot recommend it enough.

It's a great game with a surprising amount of depth to the mechanics. You do have to remember it is over 10 years old, it will struggle pretty badly once you hit around 1000 population, the AI is a bit flawed, and it's obviously never going to get an update to fix any other issues you may find. But, especially at half price, I would definitely recommend it if you want a casual city-builder with simple to understand but difficult to master game-play.

great little game to go back to every now and then, it was where my love for city builders got going, its a shame it will never get a sequel or updated but pick it up if its on offer

Just wish there was more post-launch content that would've come out. Mods have been helpful to keep the game more fun.

Banished is super relaxing and enjoyable! Easy to becoming addicted. I am tempted to play it again.

The level of management in this was astounding. Super difficult learning curve though. haven't really played much without mods if at all (don't have a single achievement unlocked lol) its truly a struggle to start surviving and get a town even started but its satisfying to finally get one going

It has been awhile since I have played but banished is in the top 10 best city builder survival games I have played. If shining rock software released another game similar to this I would definitely invest time into playing it. I even felt so happy about my purchase I felt compelled to send a message to shining rock software to let him know how much I enjoyed it.

The good:
As a simple economic medieval simulator, this game is good. The trading mechanic is fun and allows for taking advantage producing more expensive goods to buy cheap food.

The bad:
Moving material cannot not be controlled. There are no filters on storage to control where materials are stored. Logistics in general cannot be controlled. The traders and market can move items around but they cannot be told what to do or prioritize what is moved.

No fighting. This may be a good thing for some. So make up your own mind.

Disaster management is not really a thing in this game other than, "Don't build close together." Fires burn all close buildings. A Tornado cuts a wide path, so the further apart the buildings the less damage is absorbed.

---{ Graphics }---
☐ You forget what reality is
☐ Beautiful
☑ Good
☐ Decent
☐ Bad
☐ Don‘t look too long at it
☐ MS-DOS

---{ Gameplay }---
☐ Very good
☑ Good
☐ It's just gameplay
☐ Mehh
☐ Watch paint dry instead
☐ Just don't

---{ Audio }---
☐ Eargasm
☐ Very good
☐ Good
☐ Not too bad
☐ Bad
☐ I'm now deaf

---{ Audience }---
☐ Kids
☑ Teens
☑ Adults
☐ Grandma

---{ PC Requirements }---
☐ Check if you can run paint
☐ Potato
☐ Decent
☐ Fast
☐ Rich boi
☐ Ask NASA if they have a spare computer

---{ Game Size }---
☐ Floppy Disk
☑ Old Fashioned
☐ Workable
☐ Big
☐ Will eat 10% of your 1TB hard drive
☐ You will want an entire hard drive to hold it
☐ You will need to invest in a black hole to hold all the data

---{ Difficulty }---
☐ Just press 'W'
☐ Easy
☑ Easy to learn / Hard to master
☐ Significant brain usage
☐ Difficult
☐ Dark Souls

---{ Grind }---
☐ Nothing to grind
☑ Only if u care about leaderboards/ranks
☐ Isn't necessary to progress
☐ Average grind level
☐ Too much grind
☐ You'll need a second life for grinding

---{ Story }---
☐ No Story
☑ Some lore
☐ Average
☐ Good
☐ Lovely
☐ It'll replace your life

---{ Game Time }---
☐ Long enough for a cup of coffee
☐ Short
☐ Average
☑ Long
☐ To infinity and beyond

---{ Price }---
☐ It's free!
☐ Worth the price
☑ If it's on sale
☐ If u have some spare money left
☐ Not recommended
☐ You could also just burn your money

---{ Bugs }---
☐ Never heard of
☑ Minor bugs
☐ Can get annoying
☐ ARK: Survival Evolved
☐ The game itself is a big terrarium for bugs

---{ ? / 10 }---
☐ 1
☐ 2
☐ 3
☐ 4
☐ 5
☐ 6
☑ 7
☐ 8
☐ 9
☐ 10

---{ Author }---
☑ https://vojtastruhar.github.io/steam-review-template

The game has genuine depth although the addition of hundreds of building options has slanted it to the obsessive rather than the casual gamer. It's why I rarely play what is an underlying good game

A fun city builder game with many of my favorite management features!

tl;dr: great game

Banished revolutionized city builders in 2014 deviating from the sim-city formula of ploppable buildings and bringing it back to the likes of The Settlers or Knights and Merchants where all the materials have to be collected and all the buildings have to be built instead of placing them on the map. 10 years later it still holds up and is a very enjoyable game. The graphics are a bit dated but still very functional and as a bonus this game runs incredibly well until you have around 1000 citizens and start spamming farms/orchards all over the map. Aside from a small graphical bug where the wheelbarrow wasn't always properly attached to citizens everything just works and haven't encountered a single crash.

The production trees aren't all that complex and there is a lot of micromanagement involved in keeping your town alive, with probably the most problematic being leather and wool eventually clogging up your storage as it's very easy to overproduce while the consumption of clothes is fixed with your population, at some point you'll just have to trade them away since productivity of farms falls off a cliff if the nearby barns are full. There are certainly a couple of "death spirals" in the game where if you don't keep close tabs on your production, you can very easily get into a unrecoverable positive feedback loop.

The difficulty seems insane until you realize a couple of things: walking distance matters a lot so instead of building a large town, you should spread around the map keeping stockpiles/barns/houses and workplaces close together, production spread out, markets are incredibly important and the penalties for not having enough tools, clothing and education is severe. Also most workplaces are most efficient with just 1 or 2 workers, not maxing it out.

I wish there was a bit more granularity in the difficulty settings: disasters are a single checkbox so while managing fires is fun, managing a tornado that absolutely destroys everything in its path is not and there is no option to turn them on or off individually. It's also a shame that the terrain isn't really deformable: any hills or mountains are permanently not buildable so your nice town will eventually end up with paths that randomly stop but the citizens are still able to walk where you can't build.

To play a complete "vanilla" game you'll spend around 40-50 hours on a single map, maybe 100-150 hours to complete all achievements and there are tons of mods that can easily extend the playtime to 1000 hours.

In summary an excellent game and I really hope we get a Banished II, but I haven't seen anything about the developer in a while now, so I wouldn't hold my breath.

Addictive, engrossing resource management that's challenging and scaleable for various playstyles. Once you've played a bunch of the base game there are also quite a few well crafted mods to try.

when the popullations is bigger than 800, no matter if you have the best computer in planet, it will lags. And the dev who created the game doens't cares about this. I love the game and know the potential, but it is impossible to play

Very confused by all the positive reviews. This is a basic city builder with tedious mechanics and very unbalanced resources / demands. I played the game for several days in Easy mode to get the hang of it and it is already boring.

You start with a few people and some resources. Also some starter homes in easy mode. There is usual stuff like homes for the people, food, storage, resources for building like lumber and stone. All the possible buildings are open, there is nothing to level up for. There are many games just like that, Land of Vikings is the first that comes to mind.

Tutorial explains well the mechanics but doesn't cover people health and happiness. These stats, however, were mostly unaffected in my games except for one random disease outbreak. Education is also not covered. I tried building all the town buildings just to see what happens. School seems important as some forums noted educated people work better (not sure though how to measure this exactly). Chapel raised happiness by half a point. Town Hall provides statistics (this should be just available for free) and also can accept "nomads".

All the buildings require significant amount of building resources, some I felt were unreasonable. I understand this is a resource management game but it just sets you up to fail eventually. While you can grow trees, stone and iron are scattered around the map in limited quantities. You can build a quarry and a mine but they take a lot of space, can be only built in very specific locations (there is no terraforming), get depleted quite fast and after depleted, cannot be destroyed.

Trade is virtually non-existent. I started 3 towns. In one, I've not seen a single trader the whole game. In the other, a trader would appear only once in a few years and would neither have goods I want nor wanted to buy what I had. You're only given 1 animal type, 2 vegetables and 2 orchard seeds. If you want more variety, you'll need to wait for a trader to offer that (which can take decades) and then they will only trade for tools and clothes that you need yourself. (Btw if you don't get sheep, might as well just restart because otherwise you can't have reliable supply of materials for clothes.) So if you run out of a resource, you can't trade for it either.

There is no way to get new people either. The said nomads never arrived for many years. Maybe I had to wait longer but this brings me to the next point: there is nothing to do when you get your basic town going. No decorations, no new buildings to look forward to. I built a tavern that kept cranking up ale. I'm still not sure what for. It didn't improve happiness and no one wanted to trade it.

I've seen worse games and it was fun for a few hours but even on sale it's way overpriced for that. I liked that it didn't have any fighting / attack aspect like Land of Vikings and some other games but that's about it.

Half-finished sandbox. Has maybe 10% of the gameplay of a game like Anno. I can't believe I paid for this. The UI is from the 1990s and so bad it hurts. There is no point to this game.

I really wanted to like this game but the AI is just too terrible. I don't ask for perfect altruism from my citizens, but the inability to set up simple supply lines from a dock to a storage barn to 4 houses, when they are all right next to one another is honestly pathetic.

Challenging city builder, amazing at wasting time. Hard to master. Put buildings down and yell at your screen waiting for the people to get educated so they finally build your town!!!

After many years still my favourite town building game, the perfect combo of tracking population graphs and deforestation

It's an older game that is no longer being supported... so buy it when its on sale. It's a fun game to play if you like city builder games, but there is no "end" eventually you will get to a point where you just want to start over again. There's tons of potential for more but it will never come. But I still pop in and create a new settlement from time to time because it just works.

This is a poorly made and executed game by a team who clearly have no user experience or testing reviewers. So many glitchy issues that it is, unfortunately, entirely unplayable. Menus scroll to the bottom so you can't select anything - even gameplay options. No tutorial, no instructions, there is a compendium of material you can get to if you'd like to read a white paper on it, but guess what? It also auto scrolls to the bottom so you can't even select the chapters to look at your specific questions. There is no learning curve. People will just start dying. The menu is poorly laid out and hard to figure out what needs to be done. Where does a mine go? I guess you can just pick something that looks like a mountain. Roads are limited to solid increments of 90 degrees, which makes very awkward building especially because the game likes to smack you in between lots of mountains or obstacles, which you must build around. Hard to do if you only get directly up or down options - the auto build, if you try to stretch a road out a bit - will only do straight and 90 degree angled turns. It's really just awkward all the way around. Bummer.

Great little game but vanilla its kinda like vanilla ice cream mods on the other hand makes this game so great. Tons of things to do and min max but the AI needs some help for the most part. you wont be disappointed if you like games like this.

Villagers love to do nothing even after repeated commands to clear resources or build structures.

Banished offers a city-building experience that promises deep strategy, but unfortunately, it falls short in several key areas, making it a frustrating and ultimately underwhelming game. The premise of managing a group of exiled travelers to build and sustain a growing settlement is intriguing, but the lack of meaningful progression and the steep difficulty curve can quickly sour the experience.

One of the game's biggest flaws is its micromanagement-heavy gameplay. While resource management is essential in city-building games, Banished takes it to an extreme. The constant need to monitor each citizen’s needs, supply levels, and production is tedious and repetitive. The game offers little in the way of automation, leaving players constantly juggling tasks rather than enjoying the creative aspects of building a thriving city.

The AI also doesn’t help, with villagers often performing inefficient or illogical tasks, which can quickly lead to resource shortages or unhappy citizens. Furthermore, the limited scope for expansion and the lack of clear direction makes the game feel aimless, with little reward for the effort put into managing your settlement.

Visually, Banished is serviceable, but its lack of detail and charm fails to compensate for the gameplay frustrations. The soundtrack is minimal, adding little to the atmosphere. Overall, Banished feels like a missed opportunity in the city-building genre, offering a clunky, punishing experience that lacks the depth and polish of better alternatives. It’s a game that might appeal to a niche audience, but for most, it’s a forgettable and exhausting experience.

Good and complex game (or simple sandbox city builder).
Like a less beautiful, but more complex version of Manor Lords without war

It's a fun game but man is it hard. I don't know if it's a skill issue on my end or what but I seem to fail once I start getting to about 40 people. Every time without fail!

Highly addicting! I was looking for a game similar to AOE only without the "battle" aspect. This game delivered. I found myself playing until 1am the night I bought it & man oh man is it fun!

fantastic game, although a little skimp in content. I wish the creator made more

Coziest little simulator

I wish more city builders leaned into survival and out of combat like this.