Banished has some great features to it, it's simple to learn and yeilds that "just a bit more..." addiction that is the hallmark of a well designed stratagy game. The tutorial is almost unneccessary as the game is so easy to pick up, the only thing I ended up actually learning was a few UI options that were buried in unintuitive places, something a tiny bit more testing might have routed out. Nowhere near close enough to be a dealbreaker, or detach from the fun of creating a thriving city.
Difficulty is the name of the game and this game sure does have it by the bucketloads. A refreshing pace from the far too forgiving modern stratagy scene it offers a good balence of enjoyment and discovery but can somehow go into that Dark Souls-esque realm of "why is this game doing this to me!".
While it can get frustrating, it does force you to pick up and start again, keeping it fresh as I'm sure after a certain point the choices would stagnate the game slightly once all used up.
While I got a ton of hours out of it, it's difficult to recommend. The quality is getting there, sure, but the price is a bit steep (£15 at time of review) for something that still has it's first-itteration quandries to sort out, and with the infequency of patches, I'm not really sure these tiny patches will ever come around.

Banished has some great features to it, it's simple to learn and yeilds that "just a bit more..." addiction that is the hallmark of a well designed stratagy game. The tutorial is almost unneccessary as the game is so easy to pick up, the only thing I ended up actually learning was a few UI options that were buried in unintuitive places, something a tiny bit more testing might have routed out. Nowhere near close enough to be a dealbreaker, or detach from the fun of creating a thriving city. Difficulty is the name of the game and this game sure does have it by the bucketloads. A refreshing pace from the far too forgiving modern stratagy scene it offers a good balence of enjoyment and discovery but can somehow go into that Dark Souls-esque realm of "why is this game doing this to me!". While it can get frustrating, it does force you to pick up and start again, keeping it fresh as I'm sure after a certain point the choices would stagnate the game slightly once all used up. While I got a ton of hours out of it, it's difficult to recommend. The quality is getting there, sure, but the price is a bit steep (£15 at time of review) for something that still has it's first-itteration quandries to sort out, and with the infequency of patches, I'm not really sure these tiny patches will ever come around.