Banished Review - Strategy/Survival City Builder

I had forgotten how relaxing playing city builder games is.

There was a time, in the long-long ago, when city builders would pop up at a rather consistent clip. And many of these were pretty solid games, usually built around a particular historical period or theme. You had your Caesars, Settlers, SimCities and a couple more franchises, with several remarkable standalone titles here and there as well, but in recent memory, making a city builder has become something of a lost art.

Thankfully, what was old is new again and thanks to titles like Cities: Skylines and the game that I’ll be talking about today, one can hope to see some more city builder titles in the near future.

Today I’ll be talking about what it feels like to be Banished.

At the onset, Banished might look complicated, the interface wasn’t really designed to be the most user-friendly of things but everything is very well-described in the tutorials. To be honest, this is something that most city builders have to contend with, at the beginning they all seem to be hyper-complex and intricate intertwinings of an ever-increasing number of systems. But it’s more of a perception problem rather than a reality.
Going through the tutorials isn’t just a suggestion of mine, it’s something that you should definitely do with all city builders and Banished is no exception. Running the tutorials shouldn’t take you longer than an hour or so and they will explain the fundamentals of the interface as well as tell you how to set up the basics required for you to then start developing your settlement.

After you go through the tutorials it all boils down to trial an error for a few games, as you learn to deal with the mounting number of requirements that your population will have in order to grow. Be prepared to lose some settlements to hunger and the cold weather during this learning curve.
Yeah by the way, the in-game weather has seasons implemented, and this links to when your farmers - if and when you choose to make some - will be planting and then harvesting their crops. Crops which then your population can use as food, trading supplies or in some cases, to make booze and as a result, increase happiness.
The weather also produces natural disasters from time to time that you’ll have to contend with, alongside the more human-caused ones.

Make sure to expand constantly but always focus on generating enough food and firewood - at a certain point you might get overzealous because you need a larger population in order to increase production and that’s when you might start getting hit with massive food shortages. And keep in mind, if you’re hitting supply walls, checking the Banished forums might be a good idea, there are a lot of good tips there.

In terms of sound and music Banished is nothing to write home about but they do a decent enough job. Similarly the aesthetic and graphics are rather basic but due to the sheer amount of rendering and individual movements on the screen, slower machines, such as mine, will have a problem at high resolutions once the settlement exceeds a certain population number. Now I mention these not to be shitty about the game but rather to illustrate that both the sounds and graphics are actually pretty damn decent when you consider that the game was developed by just one guy. So don't take my critique in a negative light, it is quite the opposite I tip my imaginary nonsense wannabe-game designer hat in your general direction good sir, you've made a helluva solid game.

Now that aside, you might’ve designed and coded this whole thing by yourself  but I do have a couple of nitpicks and suggestions.

First, you need to be made aware that you can’t actually cultivate wallnuts. I mean you can plant one, sure, but you’ll never know if an actual wallnut tree will sprout. On the other hand you did implement the fact that fruit trees require several years to mature to the point in which they’ll start  actually producing fruit. So general tip for players, if you need to expand food production quickly, beyond fishing, hunting and gathering, first plant crops, which will yield food starting with their first year of being planted. Once your food numbers stabilize, expand into planting some orchards.
One other nitpick, the brewer can’t make booze out of potatoes? What type of high-end bourgeois people am I leading here? Also, you don’t make ale out of plums dude, you make booze so high in alcohol content, you could fuel booster rockets with. 

But, my rather intricate knowledge of what type of booze you can make out of which type of resource aside, a couple of other links in the supply chain would have been realistic additions. I’m thinking of things like, a mill to make flour and a baker to bake bread. That sort of thing. Might fall a bit too much in the micro-management side of things, but this is a rather pre-industrial sort of settlement we’re dealing with in Banished, so those would’ve been very important parts of a small settlement’s local life. Similarly, things like soil nutrient depletion would’ve made things a bit even more realistic, requiring players to be aware of that whole crop rotation concept that Fallout 1 taught us about. Also, my herdsman somehow managed to multiply one cow...yeeah you might want to look into that one.

What the game doesn’t have is any sort of combat component, or political systems implemented, which might not be bad thing depending on the kind of experience you’re looking for. There are definitely moments when all you want to do is grow your digital ant farm in peace, and not have to think about the huns invading.

In order to thoroughly enjoy playing Banished you need to take great pleasure in constantly improving and optimizing resource gathering and flow. You can only build a certain number of types of buildings and with one exception there are no upgrades in the game, so getting more bang for your figurative buck has to come from how you plan out, build and expand your settlement. And that is the operative word here, expansion. 

Banished is a slow burn and all you have to do is to constantly increase your settlement, but as you start getting higher and higher numbers of population you’ll notice it’s not as simple as just making more houses or having enough food and firewood.

I’d also be amiss to not mention the many mods that you can find right from the initial game menu, these will modify and change certain aspects of the game, some adding different features. Unfortunately, I haven’t had time to delve into these, since I have enough fun with the basic game and trying to reach its more challenging achievements. In fact, most of the Banished gameplay footage you’ve seen throughout this video has been from a game in which I tried to get the Mountain Men achievement, it was quite the thrilling and tense playthrough, since I had to plan out things well in advance, and deal with at least one year with poor food gathering which killed about 10 of my people. Just goes to show you can’t rely on fishing, gathering and hunting to sustain a growing population, on a small and mountainous map. I did manage to get the achievement though.

What Banished would’ve needed to give it that extra layer of appeal, would’ve been a more thematic approach. While playing the game I really felt the lack of an overarching theme to the game. It would’ve definitely benefited from a more particular visual identity as well. Whilst I understand this was partly the idea, Banished made me long for Caesar’s Roman architecture, Cultures’ vikings, Knights and Merchants’ medieval era pigs rolling in their sties and of course, Pharaoh’s yellow sands. I have to thank Banished and Shining Rock Software, for reigniting my long-forgotten passion for city builders, I’ve already added a bunch of oldschool titles to both my GOG and Steam wishlists to keep track of what I need, so expect city builders to start popping up now and again on my channel.

So until next time, if this sounded like your particular brand of vodka, definitely give Banished a look.

 

Upvote, resteem, comment and follow!  

...

You can find me in these places as well:  

Twitter: https://twitter.com/StefaNonsense  

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CNonsense/  

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/stefanonsense/