The wait is finally over for Shining Rock Software’s ambitious city builder/simulator, Banished. The game will see release on Steam next month, on February 18th. The game has an incredible amount of depth and ecosystems attributed to it, so the level of difficulty will certainly be interesting.

The game’s creator, Luke Hodorowicz, recently said that the hardest part of the game’s development was not the AI, or the balancing of resources – it was actually finishing the game. He described the game as looking and feeling complete since last year, but held off a final release for it due to his wanting to polish it and possibly add more to the game.

He did mention that a January release had been talked about before, but as he took time off from development this month the finalizing of the game definitely extended into next month. In retrospect, he did mention that when he quit his job to work on this game, he planned on it only taking a year, but that was back in 2011 – it has taken nearly three years for this ambitious project to be finished.

You can view the steam page for Banished here, although pre-orders are not available yet.