Ever since release and to this day Banished remains my favorite city builder out there. There's just nothing quite like this one for me.
tl:dr It's a solid 8.5/10 from me
The game drops you in with a few recently exiled people and some supplies, maybe some houses and livestock depending on your difficulty setting, the objective is to build a thriving town in the wilderness you've been dumped into. It's complex to start and has a fairly steep learning curve, your first towns aren't likely to make it very much further than year 100, and getting beyond year 200 is a real challenge, at least until you get a few towns under your belt and learn how to achieve infinite supplies by abusing the trading system.
Much of my recent experience with Banished was wrapping up all the challenge runs in the achievements, which is why I get into specifics with certain mechanics below. The game is very good and I highly recommend playing it without touching guides or attempting the challenge run achievements for your first few towns. The challenge runs taught me a lot about the game's mechanics, but get frustrating if you try to do multiple in one go. Mountainmen/Uneducated (likely others) at the same time is possible, however.
Most of the systems in the game aren't so deep that you get totally lost in them, save for the graphs menu which is simply mesmerizing, most menus rarely go beyond 1-2 layers in depth which helps quite a lot as you start learning what to pay attention to and what can be ignored. Where the magic really happens, I think, is how these systems play off each other. Usually to the player's detriment, an uneducated citizen works half as fast using twice as many resources, so things like food harvests, construction, tool and clothes crafting, et al, all get affected.
People start getting sick easier because clothes aren't being made fast enough, tool shortages become more likely as mines dry up faster, tools drying up makes the already slower crop harvesting time by uneducated workers take even longer, meaning the majority of your crops end up wasted in the fields as winter rolls in. The lack of food leads to deaths, citizens begin eating herbs (medicine) as starvation hits which leads to the disease spreading even further, wiping out even more of your labor force, killing off what remains (if any) of your educated population.
The game can end up being frustrating as part of the gameplay loop ends up being careful management of infrastructure expansions and your citizens ages, as failing to maintain a steady pace of expansion (without going too fast) or preparing properly can lead to over half of your town dying from old age because the geezers wouldn't let young people move in, or if you expand too quickly, a population boom so massive it saps your food and supplies within the next two years.
It's actually fairly easy and somewhat common starting off to make massive mistakes and not feel the effects until years later, and there's variety in how you can ruin your life. Ranging from somewhat more obvious things like expanding too rapidly and being unable to sustain the higher population, or far more insidious things like having overlapping fishing docks leading to overfishing and a hit to your overwinter food supplies. Not having a wide enough variety of food can also lead to unhealthy citizens, and subsequent sickness. Not managing the local non-renewable resources such as stone or metal properly absolutely will result in you needing a new building or more houses but being unable to do so, and a tool shortage around the corner if you can look past the problem immediately at hand. Even something as mundane as an overly long commute will wreck absolute havoc to your productivity and will get citizens killed if mismanaged. And possibly the fastest way to townwipe is having a firewood shortage. Losing in this game can be excruciatingly slow, sometimes years of being unable to stop a snowballing village loss, but firewood shortages can wipe the entire town in a single winter.
The atmosphere is very good, trees gain and lose leaves during the seasons, each season is visually distinct with unique weather, snow blankets the ground and chimneys churn out puffy white smoke in winter, time can be slowed down (ranging from 1x to 10x speed, most gameplay is between 5x-10x speed) to the point where you're permitted the breathing room to zoom in down to just about head level with your citizens. The camera controls are great here though the cursor will leave the game window on windowed borderless settings, which can make panning somewhat more difficult. Clicking citizens will give you the option to have the camera follow them around as they move, and citizens will visibly carry what they have in their inventory, so if you'd like to relax and enjoy something you've built just running then you have the option to do so.
The soundtrack is sadly just okay, I really quite like it but admittedly basic. There's a couple of standout tracks that feature throat singing like Track 6 and Track 10 is pretty somber, though you can really feel the MIDI instruments in a lot of the tracks. It's not for everyone but overall it's serviceable and you're going to hear it repeat several times as one session of Banished can easily delete several hours of your life, whereas the soundtrack is only about an hour long. I wasn't able to find out who composed for Banished though I'd love to know if the composer expanded on any work or not.
One of my favorite experiences while playing through this game was having sat down with dinner and feasting like a king while my entire town starved to death, it really felt like I was an evil overlord for an evening, and affirmed that I should avoid getting into leadership positions in reality. The game ends up feeling very cyclical since as far as I've played I haven't been able to avoid the population charts from resembling an M, citizens will die en masse every few years and there's really not much that can be done to stymy that.
There's a pretty decent modding community here as well, most mods I see aren't actively updated but seeing as the game hasn't received updates itself in some time either most of them should still work as they did before. Mods range from quality of life patches, total overhauls, small decoration addons, straight up cheats, the works really. I haven't touched many of mods yet, since achievements are disabled with mods installed. But even after 100%ing the game I still know I'm coming back to it later to see what all of those are about.
That's about it.
I've owned my copy since release and have consistently come back to play a couple dozen hours every year or two. There're games like this, but nothing that does it for me like this one does.
