Soon you move onto building homes, hunting lodges, and woodcutting buildings. You start gathering slowly renewable wood from trees, and non-renewable stone and iron from the surrounding land.

But it’s actually an unforgiving hellscape. Another thing to balance is ensuring you don’t doom your population 3 years down the line from using either too much, or too little, of what the map offers you resource-wise.

The mechanics ensure you are up for a challenge attempting to balance resource extraction with a modest expansion. Finding equilibrium as best as you can is key in this game. With this limited amount of workers and resources, you begin the town’s (hopeful) journey to prosperity. You start off in the spring with varying amounts of development, from a small but prosperous farming community of a half dozen families, to 4 families with nothing but a wagon full of potatoes and the drive to get shelter and steady food by the time winter comes around. It starts off with a simple enough prompt: A group of families has been banished from some unnamed homeland for reasons unknown to you. The rest of the game? It’s fine enough, but not as compelling as those first few memorable hours.

It was in this time that Banished came out, and while I did not pick up the game until 2019, I can definitely say that it is a unique entry to the genre with one of the most compelling early-games that I have ever played. The largest competition in the genre was from Monte Cristo’s ok enough Cities XL, which was in the middle of being rereleased every 2 years with little to no real improvements. SimCity (2013) had flopped hard with many fans crying heresy over major gameplay changes. 2014 could be seen as an incredibly disappointing time for city-builders.

Banished pc game review