If you enjoy sports games or hero shooters, here is your chance to give those flavors a swirl. Imagine Rocket League with heroes where the ball control feels more like basketball.

High skill cap, fast matches, fun heroes, all the trimmings of a modern competitive game. Give it a try, it's worth the effort to download and learn.

This game is a must-play for people that are fans of competitive strategy games, tower defense, or just generally enjoy the idea of building armies and supporting them in battle.

The overall production quality of the game is excellent, particularly considering the small team; the polish level of the UI and in-game assets is quite pleasing.

In terms of gameplay, the range of viable and interesting decks seems wide, the overall balance of the game feels fair. I've had a great time in 2v2s with deck designing. The community is small, but engaged, and match queue times are fairly short (30 seconds to 2 minutes) despite the low initial launch population.

I've made it to top-ten in bronze and silver leagues so far for 2v2s, and I must echo what the devs have said in their replies to certain reviews: If the game feels too easy, you MUST start playing in a higher tier. The complexity and intensity of the matches goes up in every tier. If you only play for a couple hours in stone/bronze, you are NOT getting anywhere near the full depth of experience.

Major congratulations to the developers on this excellent game. My suggestion: monetize more things! I want to support the game but there isn't much yet I want to buy and I've earned plenty of hard currency to buy any skins I want.

I see a lot of people commenting about how the story of the developer drove a lot of sales. I think it's great that he pulled this off more or less by himself, but if it was a bad game - it'd be a bad game made by a single person and tossed onto the pile of other no-name indie games that didn't quite work out.

The reason it's popular is that it's different than almost any other builder out there right now. Many big-name builders have gone a certain direction with their design and Banished takes a different route.

In some ways you could say that Banished is a return to the basics of city-builders; relying heavily on the nature of it's simulation, the interaction of it's various systems, rather than many of the modern features that bloat the big names.
It offers what can be a challenging survival experience through a peculiar mixture of suspenseful and peaceful gameplay - you'll find yourself lost watching the seasons and weather change, watching your villagers be born, live, and die; all the while, though, you'll experience tense years of recovering from disaster, watching your food supplies dwindle while you establish better production, worrying over the amount of firewood you've stockpiled before winter, or even about your aging citizens not having enough children to ensure continued survival.

The experience is soothing intermixed with desperation. Honestly, on a personal note, it's been a while since I cared so much about the well-being of something I've built in a city-builder. The design of the game takes focus away from all the various meta-game features that modern builders sport, and brings you back to focusing on the people and their survival.
In reading how other people have approached their settlements, in their own environments with their own mixture of disasters - I've been really impressed by the variety of ways people have tackled problems, with completely different production focuses to survive.

It seems like a game that is somewhat polarizing, some people really want all the trimmings of bigger, modernized builders. Personally, I think part of the charm of this game comes from having stripped away all the clutter so you can spend more time focusing on managing the basics - basics that have been balanced and simulated well enough to be engaging and thought-provoking on their own.

Banished is simply a fresh reboot of the genre, a reminder that you can accomplish a whole lot of intriguing gameplay by focusing on solid core design. It's not perfect and it's not going to appeal to everyone, but it's a brilliant addition to the genre with a pricetag that is more than reasonable.