The idea behind BanishedIt does not hide something really new for any lover of management games. Building our own city, paying attention to the needs of our citizens and controlling their growth to avoid scarce resources, is a common mechanic in the genre.
Its setting, somewhere between the Antiquity and the Middle Ages of a world that could be ours, is not the most exploited although we have had the opportunity to
found cities in ancient Egypt, Greece or Rome. Neither is its indirect management of the inhabitants of our village, to which we can not give direct orders but can indicate the criteria we want them to follow to contribute to the development of the village. Anyone would say there is nothing left to invent … And yet,
The biggest surprise when it comes to the game, comes when you discover that it has been developed by a single person, working tirelessly since 2011 in the simulator that went on sale this year. Shining Rock Software , whose name could sound like a team made up of at least half a dozen developers, is integrated only by Luke Hodorowicz .
And the fact that a single person has been able to recreate the mechanics that Banished offers us , is something worthy of praise. A title full of conscientiously revised features, in which few things have been left to chance, and which requires services as humble as the team that develops it. With only 512 MB RAM and250 MB of disk space, which already many mobile
devices greatly exceed, we can move this simulator. Only the doubt about future updates, and which way they could take, slightly tarnish the good work of Hodorowicz . As we will see, Banished would be happy to enjoy new elements.
Whoever prefers it, will be able to initiate in Banished with the tutorials that accompany the game, in which we will learn the basic concepts that we will need to construct successfully our towns. Once we have learned the most basic mechanics, we can launch our own adventure by selecting one of the 3 difficulty modes. Depending on each of them, we start with more or less resources, buildings and inhabitants.
Every game of BanishedIt begins with a group of families that have been exiled from their previous home, and have reached a new land in which they intend to settle. These maps are random, so we can try again as many times as we want, without risk to repeat the map thanks to the infinite random configurations.
Only the small variety of aspects in the terrain can enrarecer this diversity of games, when ending up looking all very similar. Perhaps with some additional scenarios, the game could correct this aspect.
These families are, according to the same developer, the most valuable resource of the game. Our inhabitants are born, grow, work, reproduce, continue working and … finally die. Your life cycle is perfectly defined within the game, as well as your needs. We will have to provide them with food,
provide shelter for inclement weather, treatment for their illnesses, tools for their work and, as we are, maybe a little entertainment from time to time. For this, Banishedit allows us to build different types of buildings that will allow us to satisfy these needs, which will be the same ones that our beloved citizens will live in and work with, collecting and transforming
the resources so that their new life will be much more bearable and simple. Unlike other simulators, it is true that Banished enjoys dynamism from the first moment, seeing how our villagers move from one place to another like laborious ants.
Each person in Banished has their own name, age and sex. As children they will not have more worries than to stay happy, fed and sheltered … until they reach puberty and become part of our group of workers.
At that time they will want to get married and have their own home to become emancipated, and in return we can assign them the tasks that we believe are convenient.
But never directly, because we can not choose if Fulanito will be a builder or farmer. We will simply indicate how many workers we want to each available specialty, and the system will automatically choose who will do it.
Here Banished does not discriminate based on previous experience or education, but rather on distance between home and work, optimizing travel time.
On the other hand, there is our environment, from which we can extract some natural resources with which to supply the needs of our inhabitants, cutting down trees in an uncontrolled way or causing our workers to pick stone and extract iron.
