Originally published October 2016

I've played a variety of simulation games. A sub-genre of that over-arching genre is the "city builder," of which I've played my share as well. This includes big names like Sim City, Tropico, and in a skewed way, Roller Coaster Tycoon, among others. This also includes a little indie game that was released in 2014 called Banished. Banished has been sitting in my Steam queue for quite a while and I only just recently sat down to try it.

I'll start by saying that Banished is not a bad game, but it's not a good game either. In some regards, I would say it is successful in what it sets out to do. However, what it sets out to do isn't much, especially for the $20 price tag.

The Short of It

Pros

• The tutorial is helpful and well-paced to quickly learn the mechanics

• Performs fine, even though it hitches when it auto-saves

• Is deeply involved in the Steam workshop and is built to utilize numerous of the mods available

• Roads don't cost any resources or much time to create

• People new to city builders wouldn't have much trouble understanding it

• Lots of options for how the game looks, sounds, and plays

• Tools make it easy to manage villagers and make them productive

Cons

• Really basic and rudimentary mechanics prevent the game from being very interesting or challenging

• Town takes a long time to grow in population

• Gathering and retaining resources takes a while

• Not much of a goal to the game outside of what is seen in the Steam achievements to keep you motivated

• Not enough risk/reward to what you're doing

• No progression to pace out the experience

• Dependence on mods to add variety

The Rest of It

I'll preface the rest of this review with the statement that I've only played 5 hours of the game and have not played much with mods enabled in the game. I'll also say that I'm fairly certain I picked this game up in an indie bundle sale of sorts. I can't imagine that I would have paid the 2016 full price of $20 or more for it. Maybe I did, and I don't want to believe it.

Regardless of how much I actually paid for Banished, I do not think it is worth that asking price. I'm not even sure it's worth $5. I'm not saying this to be mean or to say that the game is bad. It's built well enough that it doesn't break. The process of building up a settlement is easy enough to manage and manipulate. The overall casual nature of the game makes it an acceptable game to play when you don't want to think too hard. I just don't think what Banished is offering is worth the price of admission.

Banished is—to use a friend's term—a "distilled city builder." When looking at Banished, it is simply the city builder genre reduced down to its most basic elements and mechanics to the point that money is not even a concern. It's just about managing your resources and the overall health and happiness of your citizens. A majority of this is done by providing the necessary service buildings. For each building you set down for your citizens to build, more resources are needed to construct them. Thus you need to send them out to gather these materials, or to build facilities that will help in the material-gathering process, which require more materials to build. It's the same vicious cycle of the city builder that people familiar with the genre will recognize.

What makes Banished feel so uninspired in this situation is how the needs of your citizens and the methods of gathering these materials are so easily remedied. It never feels like there's much of a challenge or struggle in managing your people. So long as you keep track of your resources and the jobs you can make for your people, your town will survive without much difficulty, even despite the harsh weather conditions. There's also no risk of you as the player losing control of the town or losing control of the citizens, like in Tropico. Though, that would have been a good Tropico mechanic to add a little risk to the game: if you weren't good enough to run the town, you got, Banished.

Getting kicked out of town isn't really necessary to the city builder experience, since it wasn't usually a thing in Sim City. Still, variety and a set of goals are always important in these types of games to motivate the player to continue playing. I enjoy Tropico because you can assign yourself a map with a certain set of restrictions and rules that help dictate your strategy to succeeding and bringing prosperity to your people. It also had a plethora of buildings you could use to further influence the happiness and views of your people. Sim City had some of the same political influences and reasons for building something, but you also had to manage the efficiency and logical layout of your city. Placing residences too close to the industrial area, where the working class worked, would make people unhappy due to the pollution and proximity. Yet, if residences were placed too far away, you faced commuting issues. To Banished's credit and discredit, you don't need to be very concerned about that.

Again, I don't think Banished is a bad game because it functions for what it is. It is a basic blueprint of the genre. This also happens to be where my issue with the price lies. Banished relies too heavily on mods to provide the variety and mechanical changes to make the game more comparable to its contemporaries. The base buildings available are limited and boring. All you can do is use mods to spice it up. There's plenty to choose from, and it's a good thing that mods are still free. I just don't think it makes sense to charge so much for a sandbox and expect other people to fill it up with the sand and the tools without giving them some of that monetary value.

TL;DR (Conclusion)

Banished is a simple and slimmed-down blueprint of what makes up a city-builder strategy game. It has some of the necessary pieces in place and there is certainly some satisfaction to the gameplay. However, Banished ends up being too basic and lacks the necessary risk/reward, or a sense of progression to convince me to keep playing. Not to mention, the over-reliance on mods to make this barebones game more interesting rubbed me the wrong way, especially in terms of the current price at the time of this review. If Banished were $5 I'd be more inclined to accept it for what it does, but at its current price of $20, I can't recommend it.