Recent reviews by 4ltman

I am the blacksmith.

Utter trash. Controller doesn't work in this game. Avoid at all costs. Uninstalled.

Flawed, but fun.

My full review is too long for Steam. If you care, here it is: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1oIxvJ7Jzyjc46WB60kVlWE13Nakt5g2b/view?usp=sharing

TL:DR, not an awful game but generally janky and story is lacking so not recommended.

Just so good. Knows what it wants to do and does it really, really well. Spent pretty much the whole of the first island using almost nothing but the bow then moved onto using the large variety of firearms for the more difficult southern island. Story is decent, combat is very satisfying and the environment is rather aesthetically pleasing as well. A solid 30 hour single player campaign that's well worth getting. Is there a better Far Cry than this one? (Get Blood Dragon too, basically this but full of retro 80s sci-fi ridiculousness)

Brilliant. Great story, immersive environments, enemies that are just scary enough to make you stress out but not so bad that it gets too frustrating. Perhaps didn't quite fulfil it's potential with respect to the psychological aspect of the horror. It has a bit of a Dead Space 2 vibe, and I think that went further and better than this did (although admittedly in quite a different way). But for a game made by a tiny studio it was very solid, just a fantastic game!

SPPAAAAAAACCCEEEEE!!!!!

Yeah it's pretty cool. Could easily play for hours at a time completing ever more complex missions.

You will die. You will learn. You will die again. You will learn further. Persevere, and you will achieve victory.

Shoot dem aliens.

TL;DR - Good game, worth picking up, endgame gets dull if you're going for all the achievements.

I’ve just finished playing to get all of the achievements so it’s as good a time as any to review. Banished is a very solid medieval style city builder. Having the setting as a group of settlers who have been outcast from society narrows the scope so it can focus on doing less but at a higher quality. The basic aspects of the game such as the UI, gameplay and graphical style are again fairly simple but work well for what the game is aiming for.

Banished can cater both to those that just want a chilled city builder and to make something that looks nice and pretty, especially with the mod support which is fairly extensive, and also to those like me who want more of a goal out of their management style games. I initially picked up Banished soon after it’s release a few years ago and played it fairly casually, eventually adding in some mods to give the game a bit more variety, but then realised that mods disable achievements (which makes sense as a lot of them do things like double food production etc.) so I no longer had anything in particular to aim for. Eventually for various reasons I stopped playing my first town as I’d run out of things that I really wanted to do. A lot of the achievements I had left to get seemed almost unattainable anyway.

A couple of years later I got the itch to play a bit more and set myself the challenge of getting the Mountain Men achievement (to maintain a population of 50 people for 20 years on a small mountainous map with a harsh climate). When I first played I couldn’t see how this would be possible, but with some careful planning I managed it. Having done that I couldn’t see what else the game had to offer, it’s probably one of the hardest achievements to get…

…Except for Uneducated. Recently I decided I wanted to try and sweep up all remaining achievements, including reaching a population of 300 with no schools. This seemed like a real toughy, especially as I wanted to get all of the achievements in one go so I also couldn’t use trading posts or farms/pastures/orchards until I had 400 people. The first attempt ended quite quickly after I concentrated my population in one area, barely expanding beyond a single market. I realised that population concentration is an absolute killer. It prevents people from being near their assigned jobs, and given that proximity and speed are the essence of being successful in Banished it was never going to end well. Once my first two mines dried up I was stuffed.

I tried again this time building more markets and not having too many houses near them, but again I failed to reach 300 before hitting a tool shortage after expanding too quickly from which I couldn’t recover. I’d also relied far too much on fisherman as opposed to gatherers for my main food supply. Stupidly I’d been overwriting all my saves, if I’d had earlier ones to go back to that attempt probably could have been salvaged.

So I started once more, saying it would be the last attempt as I’d already put a lot of time into it. I focused more on forest colonies as I call them (gatherer, hunting lodge, forester, herbalist) which helped massively with the food supply. I expanded carefully, avoiding building too many houses at once leading to an unsustainable population explosion. On this run with an even and efficient distribution of my citizens I managed to reach 300 without schools or trading posts, and boy was it satisfying. I was looking forward to hugely boosting the productivity of my already effective town by educating my citizens.

But therein lies the issue. Reaching 300 without schools is probably the hardest achievement in the game. If you can do that it’s unlikely you’ll have issues doing everything else. So aiming to get all the achievements in a clean sweep means that you’ll get that one first and then be left with the others. The last achievement I got was to have at least 500 people after 200 years by which point I had oodles of all resources (food capped at 200000, yes you read that correctly) and I actually left the game to basically play itself for the last 35 or so game years as there was nothing else to do. I’d expanded to fill the whole map, there was no challenge left. I persevered, after all that I wasn’t going to let a couple of achievements go unattained, and having racked up a healthy amount of hours I beat the game.

To summarise, Banished is a really good management game. I won’t go into how to play it well, there are plenty of guides available. I had a lot of fun with it, especially as I listened to podcasts while playing so learnt a lot of cool stuff along the way. It has some issues (mainly the old people not leaving their houses even when they are sole occupiers which leads to annoying population fluctuations) but the general gameplay experience is solid. My main gripe is that for someone like me who was looking to ‘complete’ the game as much as anyone can complete a management game, the end game dragged quite a bit and the main challenge was over too early on. That probably suggests that the achievements were an afterthought rather than being the focus (especially as firefighter needs way more than 20 wells to actually achieve it). So that is by no means a reason to give it a bad review, but it’s still something to bear in mind. I did have some unenjoyable sessions sitting, waiting and hoping for a bad situation to turn around to no avail but they were a very small proportion of what is predominantly an enjoyable experience.