Building A Better Tomorrow

This past week saw the Steam Summer Sale come and go. Last year was the first full year I was really into PC gaming and that Summer Sale ruined me: I think I bought anywhere between 25-50 games (most of which I have yet to play even). I'm happy to say that my wallet isn't crying this year. I bought a mere handful of games which include Risk of Rain, Stronghold HD, Shadowrun Returns and Banished.

All those games peaked my interest enough to warrant a purchase, but none more so than Banished. I had a hankering for some city building and Banished looks to scratch that itch the new SimCity couldn't.

Castaways

The premise of Banished is that you are a group of nomads that got exorcised from their home town. Tired of wandering aimlessly, they decide everyone at their old town was stupid, and to start their own town...with strippers and blackjack...wait, what!? It's a simple concept that exists solely to set up the game (there are no strippers or blackjack).

There are a handful of tutorials that do well to bring you up to speed with the basics of Banished. When you start a new game, there are a few settings you can modify before it procedurally generates the terrain you will play with. The settings I mentioned are simple things like if you want to have the terrain more mountainous (which is a pain as you lose a lot of building area); how severe you want the weather to be (it gets cold in Winter); the difficulty setting, which determines how many people/structures you start off with. There’s even a setting that allows players to select whether to have disasters on or off. It's a pretty flexible system.

Sim Village

I've always been a fan of SimCity, but the latest one just didn't do it for me. The developers changed it quite a bit—made the maps smaller for the purpose of the added multiplayer—and it didn't instill the same feeling I got while playing SimCity 2000.

Banished on the other hand is just solid city building mixed with a little bit of a survival game. In SimCity, you have a population of thousands upon thousands with a massive city budget and all kinds of utilities to think of. In Banished, you start off with a group of villagers. Everyone has a name and a part to play. You assign jobs to everyone, if there is no work currently for that profession, swap them to something else. There is a lot of micromanagement if you want to delve in.

Villagers move into houses and have babies. They also grow old and die in the same house. People can die for whatever reason too—mostly due to old age mind you—and this is where the survival-game aspect comes into play. There are seasons to worry about...well only one: Winter. You have to keep the fire wood stocked up, and make sure everyone has clothing and a house to live in, or they will start dropping like flies.

Freak accidents do happen as well. So far 2 people have died from randomness: One woman died in labor, and someone else got crushed by a rock in the quarry. You set up cemeteries so that their loved ones aren't too sad when people die.

Keeping track of your villagers' happiness (along with their health) is also a part of the game. For the most part they are pretty simple. As long as they have a balanced diet (don't just have one source of food basically) their health will be fine. If it dips, you can always build a clinic. For happiness, it starts off easy; give them a place to live and something to do. If they start getting restless you can build a tavern and get someone to brew ale.

A large part of the game is resource management. You can set up all kinds of buildings to have a replenishing source of materials: Foresters can be placed to cut down and plant new trees; build a Mine to get iron and coal; Farmers plant seeds and grow crop; Herdsman keep track of live stock; etc.

The most interesting (and probably most annoying) part about the latter 2 professions I mentioned is that you can't just grow whatever, you need to have the appropriate seeds (same goes for the herding, you need to have at least 2 animals to get more). You start the game with no animals and a few seeds and in order to increase your repertoire you need to set up a trading post along the river. Once built, a merchant will boat in and trade with you. This is a really cool feature, but the annoying part is you have no control over what the merchant brings in, so if you want to grow wheat (for the beer!) or raise sheep for wool, you have to wait till someone brings it...which can take a looooooong while. I should mention that if someone does bring seeds, he is therefore a seed merchant and you can place a special order with him if he didn't bring what you wanted/needed, but he charges extra for the service.

Final Thoughts

If you like city builders and were disappointed with the latest SimCity, I would check out Banished. It's definitely on a smaller scale compared to SimCity, but it's done very well.

Overall I'm having a lot of fun with the game. I started a simple game so far (that I've put about 7 hours into) and once it starts getting boring, I'll take my new found knowledge into a new game with different settings and see what my villagers are made of!