Recent reviews by crispy

City builders, and agent simulations in general, fill an interesting niche in the gaming world. The player is given the opportunity to set his or her own goals. The game mechanics usually give you an arsenal of structures and links that let the player's choices shape, not only winning or losing, but how you go about reaching that end game. In a good agent simulation, the difficulty should flow naturally from the decisions the player makes early on. Banished is different, but the difference is not necessarily a positive one.

The most obvious comparison here is Dwarf Fortress, and the author has, in some respects, gone out of his way to evoke that comparison. From the tutorial, which has you dismantling your embark wagon, to the harsh and often unyielding climate, to the caravans of traders arriving periodically: this is a game that stands up and says, "Compare me to Dwarf Fortress." Sadly, it compares very unfavourably with Dwarf Fortress. Where Dwarf Fortress has seemingly endless layers of complexity and variability, Banished presents mostly the same scenario, regardless of how you fiddle with your limited map generation options. It's not just that there's limited choices for how you generate your map, your first build options are very limited as well. Unlike the game it so wants you to think about while you play it, Banished always plays out the same way: Expansion is incredibly difficult to manage, and mass starvation follows.

So this is the game's core mechanic, a true-to-life simulation of the constant struggle to feed a growing population in medieval times. Still sounds interesting doesn't it? It would be, if the game provided you with the tools to manage this expansion. Instead, the player is offered a simple count of the amount of food stored across the various markets and stockpiles. Information concerning rates of production and consumption are completely absent. To make matters worse, the time between being told someone is about to starve to death, and their ultimate starvation, is too short to actually hope to do anything about it.

I thought it was my approach, that I was growing too fast. So I slowed it down, way down. I had a lovely food surplus, and a happy, healthy population. Perhaps they were so happy they bred like rabbits. Even with a carefully managed expansion, I still eventually hit a mass starvation wall. If there was just a graph showing how quickly your reserves were going down, perhaps I could get in front of it. There is so much focus on making sure there's enough food, and so little reward for succeeding, that it's difficult to want to keep trying. I'm open to the possibility that I'm still doing something very wrong. Maybe there's something I'm missing that stops everyone from teetering on the edge of starvation.

Banished is not without positive attributes. It performs well, looks nice if a little bit bland. The sound is a mixed bag, often overwhelmed by cows mooing a little too often. The people and some UI elements are reminiscent of Simcity 4. Keeping in mind that this was a solo project, it's technically quite impressive. The problems seem to stem more from balance and design choices than technical considerations. Some may accuse the buildings of being bland and repetitive, but I like the realism of all the buildings being of similar construction. Indeed, the thesis of the game seems to be "just surviving is enough", and the look and feel do mesh with this idea.

Banished is not for everyone. If you have felt unchallenged by recent city builders, it's definitely a game worth examination. While the UI, in many places, has taken minimalism too far, this is something that could be fixed. While the agents, seem to starve far too quickly when there is food in the storehouse, these are balance changes that could be made. It is clearly a labour of love. It's a game that is too simple to be as difficult as it is. It's a game that's worth watching for the patch that either adds some much-needed depth to the UI, or some balance changes to the resource consumption rates. The former would make it a difficult but rewarding and realistic simulation of medieval life, the latter would make it a fun, light village builder. It might not be worth buying right now, but it's not worth writing off either.