Recent reviews by Rhythemme

This game made me instantly motion sick. I fiddled with the comfort and movement options, but it couldn't change the fact that starting and stopping movement felt terrible. With a milsim/tactical shooter you'll want to routinely move in small increments around windows, the corners of walls, etc., and doing that made my head turn in a way no other VR game has made me feel.

If it works for you I'm sure it's a fun game, but the lack of a teleporting movement option is going to limit the people who can play this.

a.k.a.: Serious-Sam-Magicka-Rogue-Urat.

Banished is a gem in the rough. Following little publicitly, it popped onto the Steam store in mid-February and enjoyed its time in the limelight of online streaming. Becoming known among many of those who know it as the game where your city dies in the winter, it seems to have enjoyed a good amount of success considering the scale of the release and the relatively unknown nature of the game.

Banished shines in the way it's presented. It doesn't just give you problems to solve, it makes you the one who determines what the problems are. Making the decision to expand your city by constructing additional houses for new families to move into provides you with a larger workforce down the line, allowing you to mine crucial resources or complete construction projects faster. But it also emburdens your settlement with the requirement to feed more mouths. And when that mouth is a child's, it won't be paying you back in the form of useful labor for years to come.

Hence your town dying in the winter.

You learn Banished through a series of catastrophic mistakes. A multi-tier tutorial can help you along in understanding the purpose of Banished's different structures, villager professions, and so on, but to its benefit I didn't find that I needed it beyond the first lesson or two. The real learning occurs when the urban center of your treasured town burns down in a fire that makes the Great Fire of London seem trivial. You learn quickly in Banished because it -hurts- to lose what you've worked up to. When something goes wrong despite all your plans and analysis, after some initial baffelement or frustration, the question always arises: why, and how can I fix it?

Like any any unpolished gem, Banished is not without its imperfections. Your prime resources - your town's settlers - offer little in the way of communication other than letting you know when they're starving to death or lacking tools. I struggled to understand why buildings weren't being constructed when I had sufficient builders and resources available, only to realize that I just didn't have stockpiles of the materials needed close enough to move the process along. Thankfully, one of the greatest tools in Banished's aresenal is the priority tool, a function letting you paint areas of the map to designate to your settlers what needs to be done the most. This expedites whatever you want done satisfyingly, and fixes a lot of Banished's occassional lack of feedback.

That said, I've had multiple towns ruined multiple times by aforementioned flash fires. Despite having water-dispersing wells placed throughout my city, the majority of it continued to completely burn down whenever a fire broke out. Eventually, and much to my gamer shame, I turned the "disasters" feature off because I just couldn't get the occassional doomsday fire to stop.

But these complaints are secondary to the great game that Banished is. If you're craving a city sim and aren't satisfied by Anno or Sim City, this is the title for you. The graphics are humble but well-executed, the atmosphere convincing, and the sandbox nature that makes each town different from the last promising many hours of play. There's real depth here, and the long term hope is that Shining Rock understands there's room to expand upon it.