In fact, seeing those empty arms is your only indication that the forest has been used up. When the population has ballooned, it becomes a major frustration. When you're tracking a small population of workers on a one-to-one basis, this is fine.

You have to zoom in, below the trees, and check to see if their hands are full. But when the forest has been picked clean they just mutely wander. But at this level of gameplay, Banished struggles with giving players solid feedback on their actions.įor instance, a gatherer will roam the area around town and carry back little baskets of roots and berries. Once I pushed the population over 50 workers it became less about dictating the free time of each individual and more about the careful accounting of performance of the population as a whole.

That plan worked perfectly until the mid-game, where the simulation gets tedious. It made the tiny Stalin inside me smile my townsfolk and I had a five-year plan. While I couldn't get to know my citizens as individuals, I had control over their lives. With such high-level strategy driving my decisions, I felt like a leader, not just a deity pushing at abstracted levers. Banished feels like a survival simulation In the autumn I pulled laborers out of the mines to bring in the harvest. The game's mechanics are closely tied to the cycle of the seasons, so in the spring and early summer I shifted everyone into the fields for planting. The game rewards careful study, and those rewards made me begin to care about my little citizens.Īt the expense of making laborers anonymous, Banished provides an enormous amount of control over their virtual lives. Banished's towns look like a busy little ant colonies from afar, but all the activity is something more. Ask a citizen to fell a tree, and watch as they chop it down, carry back and deposit a single wood resource into the town's storage. And each of those animations has a one-to-one relation to the city's production. Each step in this arduous process is shown off by delicate animations that give life to the individual tasks.

Banished pc game reviews