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7 months ago
Feature: Low-pressure area
My body betrayed me last month, trapping me in my bed when it wasn’t sending me rushing to my poor, overworked loo. I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t work and so I turned to management games to take my mind off the virus squatting inside me. Juggling budgets, disasters and production chains might not sound particularly relaxing, but there’s also a swathe of low-pressure sims that…
11 months ago
Feature: Mayors, tycoons, farmers, wardens, despots and demons
Base-building is de rigueur these days, what with all those survival games, Minecraft, Fallout 4 and now Fortnite, but before all that we had tiny top-down or isometric worlds in which we diligently built cities and dungeons and theme parks and rail networks. The central appeal of management games was and is that they give us an idealised sense of what it is like to…
2 years ago
Feature: A happy disagreement
Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time. I got my arse kicked by the readership when I reviewed Banished and made it clear I didn't enjoy myself at all. I don't mind. I'm glad.
3 years ago
Feature: Anarcho-syndicalist forest commune
Every Moday we send Brendan to plough the fields of early access and see if anything nutritious grows. This week he mismanages a settlement of brow-beaten farm workers in Forest Village [official site], a placid spin-off from Life Is Feudal’s medieval sandbox. The village of Scallyminster lies in ruins. I’d like to think I did everything in my power to help the last citizens of…
4 years ago
Feature:
Nothing says “weekend” like an afternoon spent watching a Malcolm in the Middle rerun marathon. It’s genuinely better than I remembered, but that may hold true for anything that has been viewed in order. Between you and me, though, the sitcom is best viewed as a preview to Breaking Bad. So many gas masks. So much angst. So many narrative possibilities. Anyway, pickings remain slim…
5 years ago
Banished is, to hear Alec tell it, a desperate, painful, vexing experience, but in a (mostly) good way. Eventually, though, even survival against the brutal elements, creeping disease, and human nature gets boring. That's why we invented videogames, doncha know. Fittingly, then, developer Shining Rock is currently hard at work on an infrastructure that will allow Banished players to create even more videogames from the…
Feature: When five thousand fish ain't enough
Banished is an indie sandbox city building simulation, in which you have free reign to grow a nascent medieval town using only the resources gained from the land around it. You build and you harvest, and you keep your population healthy enough in order that they might breed and expand. It's out now, and I spent the weekend with it. It made more sense once…
Things are going to get ugly in the intergalactic Milky-Way-orbiting RPS space pyramid when it's time to review splendid-looking city builder Banished. We've already divided into embittered, warlike factions in anticipation of the day we decide who'll do the honors. Those factions will, of course, splinter with time, rotting into sticky morasses of selfishness and treachery. The Smiths - made up of Adam, Graham, and…
6 years ago
If you are a connoisseur of modern-ish culture like myself, you'll no doubt remember a moving, soulful ballad by the Backstreet Boys entitled "Quit Playing Games (With My Heart)." I can't help but hear it every time I find a new trailer for splendiferous-looking rural city builder Banished, seeing as a) each brief glimpse feels like a cruel game against my heart, because b) my…
A few months ago, Adam said he'd was keen to see more of Banished. LOOK OVER HERE, ADAM! Banished is a game of city-building, where you take a tribe of exiled folk and start over, and it looks absolutely charming. It's about what happens when you take the scale out of urban planning. You'll know the names and schedules of every little person pottering about…
Banished is an independently developed settlement simulation, with a survivalist backbone. It's about heading into the wild and building to live rather than sitting on top of a casino and living to build. If memory serves, I haven't actually played a Settlers game since the second but Banished looks like it may well tap into the same part of my brain, absorbing hours of my…
I love being alive right now. Admittedly, there are many reasons for that - getting to see humanity clumsily barge its way into a new stage of evolution, being able to have pancakes pretty much whenever I want them, etc - but mostly because I get blindsided by amazing-looking new games on a nigh-daily basis. Banished, like so many others, has crept seemingly out of…
