Banished pc game reviews
Setting your town up so you have the right combination of resources to provide the best possible way to address your town’s needs is extremely satisfying, bordering on addictive. That’s the general progression of the game. Of course, if wool was available, you could provide even warmer clothing. For the latter, you need to build a tailor, who will take the leather to make jackets, which is pretty good at keeping people warm – and stylish to boot. For the former, you need a woodcutter to make firewood from logs, which are generated from clearing trees in the wilderness. Having a few places gathering food should give you enough to feed your town for a while.īut then when the first winter hits, the townsfolk will need firewood and clothing or they will freeze to death. Once you build a fisherman’s dock, say, it’s a simple matter to assign workers to fish there and they will begin collecting resources for you. Food is the first priority, and you can build various structures to collect it early on, such as a hunter’s lodge – providing venison and a small amount of leather – or a gatherer’s hut for berries, onions and other root vegetables. There were moments I wish I could make the simulation go even faster, but the “pause-able real time” mode of play works well.īanished really does make you think about the needs of a human animal in the wilderness. Time can move forward at various speeds, but in practice you’ll be running the simulation as fast as you can or pausing it to give out orders or deal with a disaster. It’s very simple and easy to play, and the tutorials and in-game wiki clearly explain the game’s mechanics. You don’t control the individual movements of the townsfolk – you assign jobs you want done like clearing away trees in an area or constructing a building. The “game” is to create a large, efficient community from a few dozen people, a hundred logs and some seeds. The settlers you start each procedurally generated area with have been pushed out of their home towns and must start building anew with very little resources. The title is probably the most evocative aspect of the whole game. Banished is a neat little simulation, but it doesn’t take long to see all it offers, and even though there’s a great interface, the game could benefit from more of a, well, soul. To really be successful, you need to trade with random merchants who come by way of the river that snakes through each area to get more seeds and livestock like cattle or sheep, but you can’t depend on anyone outside your town to keep your people alive. You build houses and roads, barns and markets, tailors and blacksmiths, chapels and graveyards – all to balance resources, health and happiness so your townsfolk can survive the rough winters and maybe even get it on with each other to create more workers for you.
#Banished pc game reviews simulator#
In Banished, a barebones town simulator from the mind of Luke Hodorowicz at Shining Rock Software, you guide the meager existence of a small group of settlers in a frontier setting. Oh crap, that sheep pasture has an infestation again.