"Hope a worker won't die" the game.
If trying to figure out the ratios between gathering resources and item production, while setting up the most efficient system you can, is the most satisfying aspect of city-building games for you, then Banished has you covered. But if you want a game with tiered production, where you have to go through a tech path, then you might find Banished lacking. Though, given its scope, it is not something you should expect from this game.
The only way to play Banished is to generate a random map and try your best at surviving in the given map (because there is no multiplayer or a campaign to speak of). Survival is the word that describes the start of the game, since the game will not hesitate to kill of your townsfolk, if you don’t attend to their needs. As with every game in this genre, you get a starting amount of resources, but that is only enough for a few buildings. So you will be forced to chop down wood and mine stone and iron that are easily findable on the ground in the effort of setting up a basic production of resources that will get you through the first few years.
In most games, you get to build your first mine or quarry pretty early on, while in Banished it took me four or five retries before I could get to a point, where I had enough people to build and work at such a building. It even might take setting up a few forest lodges before you can completely stop chopping down trees, because having just one is hardly enough to meet the production requirements you might be facing. And even having everything fine might last only a while, since you need not only manage the resources, but also your population.
The way this game handles population growth is one of my favorite things about this game. In Banished people are born, they grow up and then die. And for new people to be born, new families have to have a house of their own before they will start making babies. If you don’t build new houses fast enough, you might suffer from a population crisis, where people are dying faster than they are born and you don’t have enough workers to keep your productions running. But building too many houses can lead to over population and starvation, because all those children are eating too much food. Also, a disaster might happen and render half of your town flat. Something like a fire can destroy a lot of your housing, so make sure to rebuild them fast, before your people die from freezing to death.
This struggle to have just enough of everything before you become self-sufficient is the main source of engagement in this game. Once you grow crops and have the ability to make things like steel tools, there is very little left to do in Banished. You don’t grow wheat to make flour that can be baked into bread, because wheat counts as a regular food item just like apples and meat. The lack of deeper production systems keeps this game back and you probably won’t find yourself playing one map for a dozen hours, because there are all these different buildings for you to build. Unless your goal is to cover the map with as much of different orchards as possible.
But this is a 20 dollar game and it seems to be mainly made by one person. So you pay for it the appropriate price for what you get. Banished serves a great foundation for a bigger game, if the developer will try another stab at the genre, which I hope it will.
