The cold undocumented emptiness of Banished

You made good points about why this game is so different from the most of today's games. But is not a bad game because it's different, it's better for it.
Giving it a bad "rating", while every one else gave it good "rating", to increase the traffic to this website is a bright idea. Not a nice one, but still a good idea.

fair enough, and that's one of the things i appreciate about you as a reviewer. when i consider my enjoyment of a game, i factor in things like soundtrack, sound design, graphical representation, interface and core concept. i enjoy all those things about Banished. the core concept here is solid even if i agree with you on some of the finer details. in my view, the items listed above are strong enough to at least give this game 2 stars.

to put it another way, i think a game like SC5 rightfully deserved one star because the core game was just so horribly broken. you can't patch out bad game design. conversely, i think most of the issues in Banished can be addressed with a patch or two because the core concept is solid.

Whoa, look at all those comments! I'm sure they all have nice things to say.

Branding police would make the following correction:
"Sim[C]ity Societies"

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That is all.

What a horrible review, this game is simply amazing and you give it 2/10?

Yes lets burn him.

1 star out of 5*

ill bet this guy played with megablocks as a kid

I wonder if this review will cause people who have a problem with Metacritic's inability to accurately translate scores to complain about it to Tom.

It's a city survival game. Not a city builder per se. Get your "facts" straight.

Have you played the SimCity games? That's the only other city builder I've played, and there were no goals the last time I played that game.

Sadly some people will always want to be taken by the hand and force-fed their game mechanics rather than discover them on their own. A sad review by a man who seems to be utterly incapable of higher brain function.

Hi Tom, thanks for replying. I really don't wanna get into this too much as the subject has been beaten to death elsewhere, but I will say that one star can and will be misinterpreted as 'I think this is a bad game', not 'I enjoyed this game 1 star worth'. Which I still have a hard time believing.

I agree that the game kinda runs out of steam in terms of tech advancement, but considering it was made by one guy, I simply see that as not biting off more than one man can chew, game-wise. The UI is well done. The AI is reasonably competent. I do regret that the global overview is hidden behind building the Town Hall.

To take orchards as an example, I heard that they will gradually produce less and less. Now if there was a manual explicitly stating that, I think it would take some of the discovery out of the game. Even worse, if the manual stated, "Orchards will take 2.5 years to begin producing fruit, after which they will gradually produce more and more for 4 years peaking at 1.5x their initial yield, then taper off for the next 3 years until leveling off at 0.66 of their initial production", then min maxers can just read that and optimize. The rest of us would just go, gee, I'm running out of food, wonder why. I dunno, I think that is better, allowing some process of discovery. Having said that, I have to ding the game for not providing a graph of some sort that illustrates that curve, so players could learn, instead limiting it to last years production.

Anyway, you are wrong, and I am right. (smiley)

there's a good reason why I've never even heard of this website

Maybe the reviewer is kinda young and hasn't played the good city builders? I mean, settlers series after 3 is just plain awfull, simcity went to hell after simcity200 and so on. Yes, lacking a bit in content maybe, but finally a game where you get to test the things to find it out, instead of the game force feeding you to do things. This game surely doesn't hold you hand, and I like it. Graphics lack a bit of color, and the neverending rain is slightly annoying, but other than that, the game is great.

This horrible article isn't even worth commenting, yet here I am..

It's shocking that a hack job like this is able to influence the Metacritic score of a game. Tom Chick, you should be ashamed. This game was made by ONE DUDE and it's better than Sim City (2013) in every way. You should take down the review and post an apology to everyone involved, including your readers.

If you don't take yourself seriously, you shouldn't allow your reviews to appear alongside serious reviews on Metacritic. A professional reviewer does not take into consideration only how much he likes the game or not and nothing else.

The fact your review is a total train wreck, maybe?