First 50:
51. The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay (PC)(FPS)
52. The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena (PC)(FPS)53. 9:05 (PC)(Text Adventure)54. Mercenary Kings (PC)(Run and Gun)55. Super Pinball: Behind the Mask (SNES)(Pinball)56. Pinocchio (SNES)(Platformer)57. Iron Brigade (PC)(Tower Defense/TPS)
58. Iron Brigade: Rise of the Martian Bear (PC)(Tower Defense/TPS)59. Anachronox (PC)(RPG)60. Banished (PC)(Strategy)We don't talk about strategy games much here on Racketboy, which is a shame. I'm a fan of the genre, though I don't play them often enough, and I definitely have my preferences for different subgenres within the strategy umbrella. City-builders happens to be one I greatly enjoy, probably in part due to fond memories of playing through SimCity over and over again on the Super Nintendo. I loved it then, and I love it now. It's a generally relaxing and laid back theme, sprinkled with moments of panic caused by natural disasters and population spikes or plummets.
A few years ago I heard about Banished and eagerly began anticipating it. Gameplay videos promised a game that provided a leisurely atmosphere with a survivalist spirit, where I would begin with a group of settlers expelled from their European-esque homeland and completely cut off from the world, simple folks who would start with nothing and build their way up into a metropolis in defiance of the monarchies who spurned them. When the game finally appeared on GOG, I swooped in a grabbed it during the first sale I saw it. And then...it languished in my backlog. Hey, I'm being honest here, my backlog is huge. Anyway, I finally sat down a couple of months ago and began playing Banished...
...and I pretty much got what I wanted. Banished has a soothing atmosphere that at times runs completely in the opposite direction from the ongoing wild population swings that occasionally create crisis. My peasants require food, wood, stone, coal, steel, warm clothes, tools, herbs, education, medical attention, so on and so forth. Something is always going on, such as preparing for the upcoming winter by ensuring firewood and food stockpiles are high, trying to fend off a looming population crisis when citizens are aging rapidly and starting to die off without enough people to replace them, or new hordes of uneducated and often diseased refugees wander in hoping that they can take up residence. Yet eventually it becomes second nature in planning to deal with these problems, and after a while the town reaches a level of self-sufficiency which may fluctuate wildly but still manages to balance out. The hardest part is overcoming the first few crises as your colony slowly expands to break triple digits. Once that's done, it becomes more about managing your expansion as opposed to surviving.
Unfortunately that's also where the game's limitations become apparent, because once you've built one of everything, you realize there is no real final goal in the game and nothing new to see. Instead achievements serve as the new benchmarks of progress. Really, the achievement hunt ends up becoming your end goal, because once you've earned them all, you've done everything. That's it. That's all, folks. From there it all just becomes a sort of meditative trance, watching your city ebb and flow but always soldier on, expanding or retracting when it needs to, confronting disease or crisis but providing the means to deal with it. Eventually you'll see massive population swings in the range of 400-900 people, which is actually pretty awesome once you realize all of these people have names, families, jobs, and places they live.
That's one of the highlights for me, watching citizens be born, age, go to school, take up jobs, shack up, have kids, and then eventually die. Perhaps it's an accident, like being crushed by a rock, freezing to death, or starving. Once you've gotten the hang of things though, it's usually ripe old age. I find it a bit bittersweet, to see the name of an NPC born during the time of some particular milestone, live life, and then die 70 years later. I can see the generations play out while my people continue to march on to their inevitable conclusion.
I like Banished, but it does eventually grow dull, it's people endless and inevitable. Existence becomes boring. Still, for the time I spent with it, I appreciated it. I just doubt I'll want to go back any time soon.