IS IT WORTH IT?! | A Review of Banished in About 3 Minutes!
151This is a review of Banished, a real time city building and management game set in the medieval ages where iron and steel were the peak of human accomplishment and they were blissfully unaware of some of the terrible things to come, like TikTok and reaction videos.
The brief backstory is that you’ve been banished from your old town for some unknown reason and you’ve taken it upon yourself to create your own thriving city full of happy and healthy citizens.
Now depending on the difficulty you select when creating a new procedurally generated map, you generally start out with a handful of citizens and a small supply of basic necessities like tools, food and clothes.
On the easiest difficulty you get some prebuilt homes for your people to live in aswell as a warehouse and storage area for your stuff, whereas on the hardest difficulty you basically get a wooden cart with a very limited supply of goods and a few homeless people who are all freezing from the get go and no pre-built buildings to help you get started which I think is the best way to play it as the game’s at its best when you’re busy overcoming obstacles with a limited amount of supplies and manpower while you work to get your city off the ground.
The city building side of things is fairly simple and I’d say it’s much more about making sure you have enough food and other basic resources to properly equip your villagers and help them overcome any of the disasters that can occur, such as outbreaks of measles and influenza, random tornados that can devastate people and buildings alike, and even crop and livestock infestations that can drastically affect food production for that season.
People also die from old age so you have to continuously expand your town with new houses to encourage new couples to get together and have kids which will grow up to fill in the gaps in the job market aswell as providing them with markets, mines, farms, fisheries and other necessities needed to keep them alive and well.
In total there’s only about 30 buildings in the game which you build individually as opposed to something like cities skylines where you drag a residential area and people build and move in on their own. Some of the buildings you can make include wooden and stone houses, where stone houses use less fuel to stay warm but take more resources to build, farms with a good variety of different seeds and animals to choose from, and yes animals do breed on their own, and a trading post that lets you trade resources with visiting merchants which is a good way to get access to new types of seeds, animals and any other resources you might need.
Once you’ve placed a building any available labourers will start carrying the required resources to the building site until it’s full and then a designated builder comes to put it all together. The key is to make sure there’s always enough free labourers to take over from deceased citizens which is something that actually gets easier as your town continues to grow and your population increases.
In the beginning when you’ve only got a handful of people to work with it means that if you lose one of them it can have a massive impact on the rest of your town because suddenly you don’t have enough farmers to bring in the harvest for the season or maybe you lost your one and only builder so there’s no one to finish building the next house which could result in someone else freezing to death when winter comes and temperatures plummet.
As your town grows to include hundreds or potentially thousands of villagers and you manage to build up a decent stockpile of herbs for use in medicine along with hospitals and enough schools to educate all the kids, things actually get much easier, since you have a lot more numbers to play around with in order to fill any gaps in the production chain by taking workers off less important jobs and putting them on the vital stuff like farming.
You can choose between small, medium and large maps, though I’m not sure why you’d want to play on anything other than the largest map since by today’s standard that still feels fairly small, but it’s big enough and it gives you enough room to grow a fairly good size city of over 1000 people which takes 5 or so hours to achieve once you know what you’re doing.
Graphically it looks ok by today’s standards but as you’d expect from a 7 year old game it doesn’t look brand new. It runs well though and I didn’t suffer any crashes or bugs while playing. One of the best things about it is the fantastic soundtrack that manages to sound upbeat while also reminding you that you’re only one missed meal away from utter disaster.
The problem for me though...
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