Banished
Worth it · Strategy · 2014
Steam Deck PlayableThe verdict
BUY IT.
Worth it at $19.99.
- Length
- 15.2h
- Value
- $1.32/hr
- Reviews
- 90% positive
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Minimum on the Steam store: 512 MB of memory, 512 MB DirectX 9.0c compatible card (shader model 2), 246 MB of storage. Windows only.
In this city-building strategy game, you control a group of exiled travelers who decide to restart their lives in a new land. They have only the clothes on their backs and a cart filled with supplies from their homeland. The townspeople of Banished are your primary resource.
What drives the score
How to read this
Every input gets a grade, S to D, read from the buyer's side. The score is multiplicative, so an input only counts as raising when it sits near the top of its own scale. Anything with real room left is holding the score back, because that room is the gap to 100. ▲ marks a lift, ▼ a drag or a dock, ? an input we do not have, • a fact this genre's score does not use. The exact weights stay secret.
The value story
It has never been cheaper than $4.99. That was June 2015. It has been discounted 65 times in the 13 years tracked here, typically at 66 percent off, with about 7 weeks between sales. Today it is at full price. The last sale was about 22 weeks ago, and on this game's rhythm the next one tends to arrive within 7 weeks.
Value puts it in the top 1 percent of the games it competes with. It is pricier than 92 percent of its genre, and better reviewed than 95 percent. Among the games that feel like it, Kingdoms and Castles ($9.99, scores 84) beats it on value, while it beats Foundation ($34.99, scores 58).
73 from critics against 90 percent from players, and the player number comes from people who own the game.
8 of the 800 Steam-purchase reviews sampled here come from buyers who refunded the game, sampled from reviews written August 2022 to September 2026. Inside the two-hour refund window, 68 percent of the 1,559 reviews written there were positive, against 90 percent overall, and those are 4 percent of everything written about it.
The main story runs 15.2 hours. Doing everything runs 88, 5.8 times as long.
The drop-off
21% start to 2% rarestNo achievement in this game marks the ending, so there is no finish rate. The curve runs from the most-unlocked achievement to the rarest, and its shape is where players stop. Steam global achievements
Players
477 players at peak in the last day.
The chart appears once this game has been counted more than once.Player counts via SteamSpy.
What players say
So I've owned this game for about 10 years now, and before I say anything else; I can not express just how much I loved this game the first time I ever played it. To me it was the perfect city/society building game, or at least the start to one. Regardless of this game having been abandoned by the dev/devs (not sure the cause, I have had so much fun with this game, and very well may again in the future. But, that is...
PRO [*]Brutal but fair difficulty, one bad winter and you feel it [*]No hand holding, you actually have to think about your resource chain [*]Mod support is great if you want more content after the base game CON [*]Not much of a "goal" in the base game, no real endgame or milestones The review I've put hours into this, so yeah I like this game. There isn't really a story here, it's more about the moments you make...
What can I say really. It's a basic city builder where if you don't build it right or rush your economy it all fails pretty quickly. If you want something that is pure city building without some character chattering at you or armies at your door everytime you seem to start making progress this is the game for you. Plus so many people have made great custom mods now you can really get creative with this.
Player reviews from Steam: the most helpful all-time, plus the newest that clear the same quality bar, with the hours each player had put in when they wrote it. The mix of Recommended and Not recommended follows the game's Steam ratio. Rotates daily. Opinions are theirs.
Cite this score
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Banished scores 83/100 on the BANG Score (worth it). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/242920/banishedThe BANG Score is one number for value, 0 to 100: price against how it reviews and how long it was built to be. It answers the money question and stops there; whether the game is for you is still your call.
Reviews set the ceiling and price moves you inside it, so a cheap game that reviews badly cannot climb. Ratings from few reviewers are shrunk toward the middle, so 100 percent from nine people does not outrank 96 percent from ninety thousand. Length comes from HowLongToBeat where it can be matched, measured against a per-genre floor so a five-hour narrative game is judged against other narrative games rather than against a sixty-hour RPG. Where no verified length exists the score says so and carries a dock, because the biggest input is then a guess. The full method, including where it is weak → Steam reviews as of Sep 12, price as of Sep 24.
A number here look wrong? Tell me what it got wrong and I will look at the inputs behind it.