In a genre that has been completely dominated by SimCity for as long as I can remember, Banished is refreshing enough to perhaps warrant a play, but won’t keep you coming back for more.
City building games are essentially endless; that’s part of their appeal. The goal is normally to create a utopia where everyone lives a perfect life without crime, hunger or the threat of imminent death hiding just around the corner. Unfortunately for the citizens that live in Banished, life mostly focuses on worrying about that last one. This isn’t you normal run of the mill city building game where you try to make the biggest and best city you possibly can, Banished is a game focused on survival, and this is by far its biggest strength.
When I first saw the screenshots for Banished I was excited, but worried. Obviously, a medieval city-builder looked awesome - but I was concerned that it would just be a SimCity clone set in the past, without actually adding anything to the genre. So when I started playing, I can’t tell you how happy I was to have a city building game that breaks the mold and tries to do something new, rather than relying on the success of past games. For fans of the genre, or anyone who has ever enjoyed SimCity in the past, this game is definitely worth picking up.
Managing your city in Banished is more than just letting the populace do whatever they want. Unlike other city-building games, citizen management is a huge part of Banished and makes up most of the gameplay. There are dozens of different roles within your town that have to be filled, and it’s your job to assign workers to each of them to make sure that your town has all of the resources it needs. For some people, having to constantly micro-manage your town will sound like just the best thing ever, because some people (including me) are a bit crazy like that; but for many players, that will sound about as fun as scraping a cheese grater across their forehead.
Personally, I like the idea that my city needs constant work; it means I’m always involved, and I can take full credit when my city succeeds; and you are going to have to constantly work, because this game is absolutely brutal. It punishes you for the slightest mistake, and one build order problem could cause your village to starve next season. This isn’t a game where you die quickly - the suffering of your people will be drawn out, and you’ll spend time trying to fix a city that is beyond saving. It made me question my own morality when I was actually celebrating the death of children in my town; it meant that there was one less mouth to feed. This isn’t a game that is scared to let you fail - in fact, Banished seems to encourage a trial and error style of play, encouraging you to come back multiple times to try and survive on the same map.
I think I speak for many gamers when I say that doing the same thing over and over again, with very little variation, doesn’t sound like the sort of gameplay that would draw you back in time and time again. Banished really falls short if you asked yourself, “do I want to play this again?”; There isn’t much of a game to explore in a later play-through. I understand that the game was made by one person, and for one person to create what they’ve created is very impressive; but for a player, it doesn’t matter whether a boring game was made by one person or one hundred - it’s still boring.
It’s obvious that Banished was created by one person, not a full development team. What the game does, it does very well: the citizen management is a cool new feature, and a focus on survival separates it from other games in the genre. But beyond that, there just doesn’t feel like there’s much to this game. It feels empty. I felt like the game had showed me everything it had to offer once I started assigning citizens to certain roles and placing buildings at the right time, which is a disappointment. Innovation is rare in the medium at the moment, so it’s disappointing to see a game with so much originality and potential fall short of the mark.
It’s not even that there are bad features; it’s the things that are missing that make this nothing more than above-average. I think the developer did the right thing by focusing on the key features required, and making them as good as he could, but the reality is that city building games are often popular because of their large scope and the ability to make your dream city. I would have loved for the ability to create a medieval metropolis. The developer could still have done that and not sacrificed the difficulty of the game, giving the player the challenge of feeding a huge number of people.
Another huge missed opportunity comes in the form of the lack of any other cities to interact with. I would have loved to be able to be able to trade resources with other cities, whether they were human or AI controlled. That would have added a whole new dynamic to the game - not a money-based system, but one where trading for the right resources became vital for expansion, or perhaps even the survival of your town. On the flip-side , I was extremely disappointed at the lack of any sort of invasion mechanic; in a medieval game focused on survival, it feels like a missed opportunity. There are a few disasters that can occur, but in the main, the game focuses on hunger and exposure, not any sort of threat posed by other cities. Considering the time period that the game seems to be based in, that would have seemed like a fun challenge to include in. However, the lack of any communication with other villages does make you feel isolated and alone.
There is a trading system of sorts in Banished, but you only ever trade with the nomads who visit your city every now and again, rather than with other actual towns, which I found disappointing. There was one feature of the trading that I did like, and it was the need to buy livestock and trade for better seeds. When you start the game you have no livestock and only a few types of seeds, and to get more you have to trade with the nomads. I’m happy that they made the trading a feature that is encouraged, I just feel like there was huge potential there that was missed because of the limitations in the development team.
Graphically, Banished is nothing more than what I would have expected. It’s certainly not groundbreaking, but it’s still a good-looking game. Texture quality isn’t great, but that’s normal for a strategy game - and you’ll never actually zoom in far enough for it to matter. The animals that your hunters kill for food are a bit buggy though; it does ruin the immersion a bit when a deer walks across a river rather than walking around it. In addition, Your villagers are a bit generic. Everyone looks pretty much the same, and the aging of your population isn’t always reflected very well; citizens simply jump from being a child to being an adult. These all seem like things that were ignored because of the one-man development team, but they aren’t things you should ignore when you’re deciding whether this is a good game to invest your money into.
Banished is a welcome entry into the city-building genre. However I think the developers bit off slightly more than they could chew with it. If anything it proves that the concept works, and perhaps over time features can be added to extend the gameplay and create more of a game to explore. It’s a game that could be improved immeasurably if a sequel were ever to appear. But, for now, there isn’t enough here for me to strongly recommend Banished to you.
