After over 100 hours of playing it is definitely time that I write a review for this game.
I bought Banished on a whim during the summer sales, I played lots of Sim City 2000 during my childhood and I was after another game like that but of course at the time Cities Skylines was out of my budget, so after a bit of YouTube research I added this to my games collection.

When I started my first village I was completely lost, in fact my first four or five villages were complete failures. This game had a lot to balance up, a constant battle for resources that I always seemed to lose, it was very frustrating at first and I almost abandoned the game with about five hours playtime. I took to YouTube again and learnt the basics of making it through winter and keeping up with farming and eventually I made it past the usual three year mark and got a village that was actually growing and moving forward. With the town in full swing I was able to expand further and further, making smaller communities that would join with marketplaces and eventually with trading ports to bring animals, all leading up to the town hall which is great for prediciting resource consumption, housing needs and allowing the entry of nomads.

At this point I was spending almost entire days just tending to my village, I built a huge bridge spanning across a lake to connect up two distant communities and made both self reliant, with each year adding more houses, schools, forester lodges and so on. The problem is that if you don't maintain just one element of your village, the collapse is VERY sudden. One year my sheep got sick and this affected the whole herd, meaning I had to kill them all; in tern this meant that my tailor couldn't make the highest quality coats and since I didn't change the settings to a lower material, I had no coats stockpiled for winter, leading to many of my villagers freezing to death.

My newest village is going strong with around 280 citizens but everything lies in the balance, the further you get the more you have to keep track of, but it feels very rewarding to make it through a year without someone starving to death. I have to juggle my farmers around so that once a harvest is finished they are then pushed into the mines and quarries to retrieve resources until spring comes again, if I forget to change that option in time then that causes a huge drop in my food production, so yeah you need to stay on top of everything. My screen is usually covered with all my building objectives that need to be filled and the town hall stats that will show where to put my labourers.

That all being said, Banished isn't going to be a game you will return to every week, I could play for days on end at first but now its a bit intimidating returning to my town, that could be because of the stress of it all. The music can get quite repetitive but overall I did really enjoy the soundtrack, very appropriate for the theme of the game, but when you hear the music on start up everytime it can just get you out of the mood of playing, i'd put a playlist of your own on standby if you're going to play for more than two or so hours. I have been lucky to avoid most of the in game disasters unlike other players but that can be toggled to your preference. I agree with some players that there could have been a few more build options on top of what there is, more types of housing is something I would have enjoyed, but i've been playing without any mods so far and haven't felt the need (yet) to go in search for them.

Once you get your first successful town, the game is very cosy and its great to have the different map seeds with flat land or valleys to spice things up. You are going to need patience at first that is for sure, look up guides if you get caught in the lag of the first few years and that will help move things forward. The art style is quite detailed for such a small game and the camera feature that lets you cut back and forth to far apart settlements is so useful, in fact many of the shortcuts available make management of the game a lot less stressful as you go along.

Banished is a game I would definitely recommend to anyone I know. While it has difficulty options available to you, I would say this game is for people in that middle zone with it being a bit challenging for casual players and maybe lacking that complexity a more hardcore simulator player would prefer. Go watch some videos and add it to your wishlist!