Banished

Banished is an interesting study in gaming, I thought I should love this game, but, although I enjoyed it, there just wasn't as much as I thought there would be. True, as stated, I did enjoy the game, but not unreservedly. Good interface, tight control mechanics, and really nice graphics are all present, but that alone won't stave of eventual boredom.

Not much story here, you control a village of people who have been banished (hence the name) from their own community and have to start fresh. You build homes and produce everything your village needs to thrive, growing crops, creating tools, etc., while facing inclement weather, random disasters, ranging from tornadoes to flat out starvation and even the odd suicide, and just plain dealing with the environment.

A village on the verge of collapse.

It's largely an exercise in resource management with very little micro-management: you tell your villagers to build tools or grow crops, but beyond telling them what kind you have no control over how they do it. The goal is to make your village thrive with no real endgame, just keep on building more houses, trying to keep people happy and healthy.

I played quite a few hours of this game, so obviously I didn't hate it, however, with no endgame goal to achieve I found myself getting bored; generally when this happens I work toward achievements, as I'm very goal oriented in my gaming, but I found they require a fair amount of skill/effort to get, so that was met with mixed results.

I'm giving this one a 7/10, at least partly because I got it so cheap during the last Stem Summer Sale. If I had to pay the full price of 19.99 the score would have skewed much lower, but if you enjoy that SimCity vibe and want a well constructed game to play it on, this is a hard one to pass up.