Banished Review (igotskiz)
I'm mixed on it. There's no graph of whether you're producing in the positives or negatives, and the game is wildly imbalanced, in a difficult way. I have a population of 100 villagers and maybe 50% of them dedicated to some food-producing role, and whenever I accept an influx of nomads, everyone starts starving to death. Literally, I will have villagers with food in their hands walking to the barn and they just fall over dead with the food in their hands, leaving it there for someone else to go pick up. Or certain years where your entire adult population keeps falling over dead due to old-age.
Then there's a lot of things that don't make the most sense. Markets are essentially super-barns, and people will go out of their way to store things there, which means even more inefficiency. Hunter Lodges, Foresters, Quarries and Mines don't produce nearly as fast as you think they would, and there's nothing besides better tools or educating them to make them more efficient. But watch out! If you make a school, it will randomly pick apart 10%~ of your population AT RANDOM to become students, who will no longer produce an output at their job site, leading to economy crashes the moment you start educating people. Instead of only educating children, who can't hold jobs.
The UI is a mess. Having everything being in normal windows is fine but it'd be nice to have some kind of dedicated resource monitors, population graphs, and the event log being embedded into the game instead of being a removable window.
Then there's the villager AI. By far the most egregious part of the game. Villagers will take the most un-optimal routes to do things, or they will go to a jobsite and do a minute's worth of work, then decide they want to go visit the herbalist on the other side of the map. Or if you decide to clear a swathe of land, and put a stockpile next to the cleared area, they will begin clearing and *SOME* will put resources there, but then others will carry it back to some other random resource pile in town. There's no rhyme or reason to it. And there's no way to delegate or say, "Hey, clear THIS area and put it into THIS temporary resource pile for speed. When you're done, move everything to THIS permanent resource pile."
But when the game works, it's pretty fun. It's beautiful seeing the small village grow into a huge, bustling town. It's also extremely low poly, which means the game can run just fine on most low-end machines. Unfortunately, it's no longer being worked on and the flaws are here to stay, permanently. The game could hugely benefit from tweaking some of the numbers for aging, starvation, and cold. Or even adding a way to adjust those in-game, as of right now there isn't aside from mods. It could also benefit from some kind of research or talent-tree system that offers permanent bonuses to your town, as the snowball effect from research in other games is always fun and welcome.
It's 2025, and I got this game around 2017~. The game is "finished". It's no longer being worked on. And I can't help but to think it's in an abandoned state. I'd give it a 4/10. Slightly below average. I want to like the game but there's too many flaws with it, personally. For $20 it's not bad at all, but it's important to know what you're getting into.