Banished

Two Banished reviews, twelve years apart, describe the same moment. One was written the week the game launched in February 2014: after a few good harvests and a working trade dock, there was nothing left to figure out. The other was written this April: "after you've built the ~15 buildings there are, there's really nothing left to do except make more of them." Between those two points sits a game that still holds a Very Positive rating from over 37,000 players, a genre it's frequently credited with reviving, and a developer who hasn't touched its code since 2015. All three of those things are true, and none of them contradict each other once you understand what Banished actually is.

A colony that lives or dies on logistics

Banished's whole design rests on a single, unusually strict rule: there is no money. You can't sell a surplus of wood to buy the tools you're short on. What you have is what your people have made or gathered, full stop, and the only way to convert one resource into another is a trade caravan that shows up on its own schedule and might just as easily bring disease as bring the livestock you wanted. There are no skill trees and no tech unlocks gating what you can build — any structure is available from the first winter, provided you can spare the labour and the materials to raise it. That's a genuinely different foundation from almost every city builder that came before or after it, and it's the reason the opening hours are as tense as the genre gets. A single bad harvest, timed badly against a hard winter, can spiral into starvation before you've noticed the problem exists. Nothing in Banished holds your hand through that; the game's difficulty is entirely a function of how well you read a map before you commit to it.

The citizens themselves carry the other half of the appeal. They're born, they age, they marry, they have children of their own or they don't, and they eventually die of old age or something less dignified — and none of it is scripted. It produces the kind of emergent, personal storytelling that keeps showing up in reviews from every year of the game's life: a founding couple who never had children and left the town's second generation to strangers, a blacksmith's whole line dying out in one bad winter. That system alone is why Banished still gets cited as an influence on the colony sims that followed it.

The wall almost everyone hits

The trouble is that the same rule set that makes the opening so gripping runs out of things to say fairly quickly. Once a town has a stable food chain, a couple of trade routes bringing in whatever was missing, and enough houses to keep the population climbing, there's no new problem left to solve — just the old ones, again, at a slightly larger scale. That specific complaint is remarkably consistent across the game's entire lifespan. A review from November 2024 puts it plainly: "there is no real progress after u get the hang of it and unlocked everything by trading... after 8h I have everything unlocked and don't see a point in further play." One from December 2025, at 67 hours logged, says almost the same thing in more words: "after a solid foundation it's just incredibly shallow. After a few hours you've seen it all and done it all." These aren't players who bounced off in the tutorial — most of the negative reviews making this argument sit between ten and seventy hours, which is long enough to have genuinely explored what the game offers before concluding there's a ceiling.

Citizen AI compounds the problem rather than distracting from it. Workers will walk past a nearby storehouse to reach a farther one, or starve in a field with food sitting in their own inventory — complaints that show up from a 2023 review ("stupid AI... how is it possible for a hunter to starve in the field when they have food in their inventory") through to a 154-hour review from December 2024 calling out the same inability to route goods sensibly between a dock, a storage barn and four adjacent houses. None of it is game-breaking on a small town. It becomes the whole experience once a settlement grows large enough that logistics is the only thing left to manage — which, per the progression complaints above, is exactly the point at which most players are already looking for a reason to keep going.

What the numbers say about who gets anywhere

Steam's global achievement data backs this up with something harder than aggregated grumbling. Even the single most commonly earned achievement in Banished's 36-achievement list — Smiles All Around — sits at just under 21% of all owners. The next tier down, covering things like keeping a town healthy or building your first sizeable settlement, clusters in the 13–20% range, and the list falls off fast from there: Educated sits at 4.8%, Miner at 4.3%, and long-haul achievements like Tenure bottom out at 1.3%. Read plainly, that means a large majority of people who own Banished never reach even its earliest milestones. Some of that is simply the nature of an open-ended sandbox with no scripted win condition — plenty of players build one town, feel satisfied, and stop without chasing achievements at all. But set against a decade of reviews independently describing the same mid-game plateau, the achievement curve reads less like disinterest and more like corroboration.

The one place the game's limitations get genuinely severe rather than just repetitive is scale. A review logging just under 1,951 hours — by some distance the longest playtime in the negative-review sample — reports that populations above roughly 800 residents grind the simulation to a crawl "no matter if you have the best computer on the planet," and says the developer has shown no interest in addressing it. That's a specific, high-investment complaint from someone who clearly likes the game enough to have spent two solid months of real time playing it, which makes it worth more than a one-hour refund review saying the same thing.

The price is fair; the support isn't there

None of that is really Banished's own fault at this point, and it needs saying plainly: this is a one-person game, and it has not received a content update since a beta build in October 2015, per Steam's own news history for the app. Shining Rock Software's own website has posted exactly once since November 2021 — a short piece from April 2022 about "code rot," discussing an entirely separate, still-unreleased successor about nomadic villages travelling between islands, with no release date attached even now. There's no indication Banished was abandoned in anger or that anything is broken beyond repair; it's simply a decade-old solo project whose developer moved on to building something new a long time ago. A community mod scene has picked up a fair amount of the slack, and Steam's own news feed has pointed players toward mod round-ups as recently as 2020, which says something about how much life modders have squeezed out of a game its own studio stopped maintaining nearly a decade earlier.

Against that, the asking price is easy to defend. NZ$23.99 with no DLC, no in-app purchases and no premium currency of any kind, and Banished spends a lot of its life on sale at 66% off, per Steam's own promotional history. Whatever you think of the mid-game plateau, nobody is being nickel-and-dimed for it.

Final verdict

Banished earns its long-standing Very Positive rating on the strength of an opening act that's still genuinely excellent: a resource system with no money and no shortcuts, a population that lives and dies as individuals rather than a number ticking upward, and a real sense that one bad decision can end a town. What keeps it at a 7.0 rather than higher is that the game has never grown past that opening act, that its citizens still can't be trusted to route their own supplies competently after twelve years, and that nobody at Shining Rock Software has touched the code since 2015. Judged against what it was trying to do in 2014 — reinvent the city builder's basic economy — it succeeded, and succeeded distinctively enough that its fingerprints are still visible in newer colony sims. Judged as something worth a hundred hours of a 2026 player's time, it isn't, and the achievement numbers and a decade of consistent reviews both say so.

Players drawn to the idea of a small population you manage individually, one life and death at a time, without a scripted campaign steering the outcome, might also enjoy Wanderer, where long-term progression keeps moving even when you're not actively steering it.