Jamesman posted:

Banished

This is one of the hardest city builders I've ever played. You need to be constantly growing and expanding your village, but you need to do it at just the right pace. Too fast, and your population will boom and start consuming resources faster than you can collect them, and they'll starve and die. Too slow, and your population will get too old and birth rates will drop and you'll have nobody to refill your workforce with and they'll starve and die. It's a tightrope.

Everything's available to you from the start, with the only progression being that you can trade with ships to obtain new crops, trees, and livestock, but there's no real difference between anything and it's more just trying to fill out a list of items. There are achievements, but they can be quite difficult to get and also serve no purpose to gameplay. The only mode here is "survive as long as you can" with a few different options for terrain, map size, starting materials, weather, and disasters. No scenarios or challenges. Just try to walk that tightrope for as long as you can until it all goes to poo poo.

Being so hard and everything feeling the same no matter how far you get makes this a game worth passing up. It has mod support so maybe you can find mods to turn it into a fun game.

4/10