Banished

After the snow is melted away by the lazily spring sun the BanischdTown people are heading to the fields and its time to decide what to plant. With potatoes, beans, corn and wheat a greater crop yield is achieved but the citizens of the town are healthier if they eat different variety of food, so a small compromise is needed. When the summer comes the fields manage themselves and the townspeople can concentrate on collecting building resources, make cloth for the winter, work in the iron mine and help the smith . When autumn begins everybody in BanishedTown is back on the fields again as autumn is the harvest season and if the crops a left to stay in the cold too long they are ruined. Autumn is also the time for the last preparations before winter the last bit of venison is carried into the stone houses of the hungry citizens and the wood cutters and foresters work newer stops. And Winter of course is the season to rest! No not really. First of all the hunters work in the winter as their products are one of the few that can still provide food in the cold month. Not much still because the wild is scared and in hibernation but something is better than nothing. Also an important part of the building activities of the town need to be done in the winter as spring and therefore plannting time comes always around if the year before was planed well managed good.


In Banished you are controlling a group of Banished people who try to survive in a surrounding field with dangers and opportunities. If you manage well and plan ahead you are rewarded with a thriving town and educated, happy citizens who live their lives in comfort, a price which is quit satisfaction because of the high skill demand of the game. Best explained is the game by saying it is  group survival, real time strategy  and resource management game. A Great thought of and with this game accomplished concept which creates a game that is in some ways the first of its kind. The greatest addition in this game is the "human as resources" element. As in many other RTS games humans are not considered as a strategy giving part at all, like for example in the Anno series. Or the human "resource" management part of the game is not as much advanced as in Banished as for example in the settler series, age of empires series (empire earth series)...  The other great concept of the game is the real time survival strategy part as Banished really feels like a survival game. One mistake and half of your townspeople die in the winter and that's a situation after which it is difficult to recover again.

Banished comes with a huge variety of different and comprehensible resources which are connected with each other in understandable connection and traceable chain productions. For example the hunter does not come home with just meat, he comes home with venison and leather. The venison is than used as food and the leather goes to the tailor to create warmer cloth. Or the gatherer does not just gather food, there are many different roots, mushrooms, berries and herbs it can collect. Its true that the chain productions do not have the advanced level of a Settler 7 or a Anno 1701 but sometimes less is more (or less is not too few).

I personally would have wished for a slower start into the game as one of the first buildings you build in the beginning is a 2 story hunting cabin that than is just filed with one hunter as not enough people are available to hunt. That's a situation which bothered me quit allot as it takes away some parts of the toughly  created realism in the detailed variety of resources.

In general the auto placement of the citizens to houses near to their work side, works good, but a system where the player could decide by himself who is going to live where would have been more intuitive. As it bothered me allot that sometimes the computer would not get it right.

Another situation that totally ruined my first game-round was that I decided its a good idea to build many small farms. Sadly I realized afterwards that managing these farms is an impossible task.

Because each spring it has to be decided which field are work on and what is going to be planed on each field. A selection the player has to make manually by clicking on each field assigning a farmer and selecting the crop. In this situation an automated system would have been an crucial improvement of the game.

In general there is a bad feedback according productivity of all kind of production chains and bad general statistics. A situation that  leaves small room for satisfactory optimizing of the town.
I also think that there is a bit of a balancing problem in late game as it kind of gets more difficult to collect enough timber and stone for upgrading and building higher ranked buildings.

In the conclusion I have to admit that I have a huge respect for the game and its developer as it is a one man project.  I think the comprehensible resources, the general concept of the game and the humans as resources idea is phenomenal but the realization and implementing of some game mechanics is quiet weak.