Banished review: feast or famine

Shining Rock Software has rolled the genre back to the middle ages. There's no sewer system to manage, no power grid to maintain. Just a group of settlers pushing into the wilderness, and a wilderness that pushes back.

This simplicity creates a focused game in Banished. It starts as an intimate simulation and grows to be a taut, strategic experience.

Banished feels more like a survival simulation than a traditional city builder. I was plopped into the middle of the wilderness with a dozen people and some supplies, which they immediately began consuming. The race was on to clear enough land to plant crops and build houses before winter.

Each step in this arduous process is shown off by delicate animations that give life to the individual tasks. And each of those animations has a one-to-one relation to the city's production. 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. Banished's towns look like a busy little ant colonies from afar, but all the activity is something more. The game rewards careful study, and those rewards made me begin to care about my little citizens.

At the expense of making laborers anonymous, Banished provides an enormous amount of control over their virtual lives. 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. In the autumn I pulled laborers out of the mines to bring in the harvest.

With such high-level strategy driving my decisions, I felt like a leader, not just a deity pushing at abstracted levers. While I couldn't get to know my citizens as individuals, I had control over their lives. It made the tiny Stalin inside me smile; my townsfolk and I had a five-year plan.

The struggle for information makes Banished especially difficult at points. As I swung wildly from feast to famine and back again, lots of people were left cold and hungry. Entire towns died off before I had an understanding of how to cycle through methods of generating food in order to reliably collect enough to make it through each winter. And even then it was more guesswork than fact; let's try hunting more this year, fishing more the next. While future towns benefitted from my experience, Banished put me through an emotional wringer to earn any pride I felt for my little ant farm.

My only comfort during these tough times was to zoom into the gorgeous fully 3D world. Banished looks phenomenal, and it ran without a hitch at maximum settings on my two year-old PC, even in the late game when my town of nearly 200 began to sprawl across several screens.

At such a large scale Banished resembles a little clockwork machine with hundreds of tiny parts. And as the movement began to slow, the complexity of the simulation allowed me to easily pull off the gears and reassemble them in clever ways. When a disaster, say an infestation of insects, began to attack the crops, I pulled workers from the quarry to quickly bring in the harvest. At the same time I repositioned workers from the coal mine to clear more land for fast-growing, alternative crops. It was a joy to find that sometimes my improvised solutions even worked.