Before We Leave

released on May 08, 2020

Before We Leave is a non-violent city building game set on multiple planets in your own cozy corner of the universe. Your people emerge from a long period hidden underground and they’ve forgotten the world above. Rebuild civilization back to what it once was by building huts, harvesting potatoes and expanding your reborn society to other continents and eventually other planets. Manage resources, discover ancient tech and create a multi-planet network of colonies to thrive in your solar system. But the universe is not always a safe place. Ancient guardians, remnants of your ancestors, will demand your attention and challenge your cities. The planets you inhabit are scarred by the disasters that forced your forebears underground, and those disasters will still plague you if not managed properly. And most of all, watch out for vast planet-eating space whales coming to graze on your planets! Before We Leave is a (mostly) non-violent game. There are no weapons, no fighting your neighbours for control of resources and unless you fail to handle an incoming space whale, your people will not die. Play, expand and chill out at your own pace in your own solar system of rehabilitated planets!


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Gave this a few hours but it never presented me with any real stakes to motivate me to keep playing.

Anno's slightly wonkier cousin. It's nice for a while, but gets a bit annoying later on because of some non-intuitive restrictions on what you can build and farm on each island, so at first you try to manage supply chains and then give up and let all items criss-cross everywhere. Interestingly enough, this city builder has a bit of a problem with its ending - space whales are attacking regularly but rarely over the course of your session, and you can build a super-intensive planet-wide energy shield which is pretty cool, or you just build a whale charmer and the game is won. It's not bad, but I'd just say to play Anno (1701) instead and ignore its war mechanics.

Cute visuals, but little new in terms of gameplay. Shelved after ~3 hours.

UN excellent jeu de gestion type city Civ, en beaucoup plus simple (amis pas simplet non plus) : le style graphique est fun, la gestion des éléments est finalement assez complexe (arbre technologique bien touffu), mais pas de stress : pas d'argent à géré, pas de guerres, pas d'ennemis...
Juste faire gaffe quand on commence à s'étendre, à bien géré la chaleur ou le froid sur certains continents au risque d'avoir une production à 0.
Je suis jamais allé au bout par flemme, mais plusieurs dizaines d'heures de jeu.

There's definitely a solid core of crunchy city-building within this game. The core logic of a hex-based map with various adjacency bonuses is smart, giving rise to a lot of emergent strategy out of a relatively understandable set of mechanics. But it fumbles many of the details that are necessary to grow that idea into a complete game, and ends up a frustrating shadow of what it could have been.

While my wife and I played this game together, we came up with a laundry list of complaints about it ranging from the control scheme (Why is there no hotkey for switching between planets?) to the UI decisions (Adjusting storage in a warehouse is a nightmare) to the onboarding (Why is there no Civilopedia equivalent? Why doesn't it explain core concepts like "an action"?). But ultimately, our biggest issues fell into two categories: transparency and suburbism.

The first is especially egregious in comparison to The Colonists, which is an excellent city-builder largely because it gives the player so much visibility into and control over the details of how resources flow through your civ. This is crucial for games like this, because it provides another avenue of emergent strategy, but it's totally absent in Before We Leave where you can see resources in motion, but you can't easily track them at rest or understand how their flow operates over time. It's hard to understand the paths your peeps travel even though the adjacency mechanics make this pathing critical to the player's success.

Specifically, passing near certain tiles (fountains, trees) improves the mood of a given peep while passing near others (tall buildings, pollution) makes them unhappy. Because housing imposes substantial tall building "gloom" penalties and the best food production produces pollution, you're incentivized to reproduce a suburban city layout with home, work, and food separated strictly by function. While this could pose an interesting mechanical puzzle, as a human player I want to build a city I'd like to live in. I personally love walking among mixed-use apartments, row houses, and restaurants and it's a bummer to play a game that frames that as bad.

Even the mechanical puzzle kind of sucks, though. The gloom mechanic discourages density of housing, but housing adjacency bonuses are so strong as to outweigh that completely—meaning that you just have an ambient gloom penalty all the time that you can't really address. As the game moves to later stages, this seems to be its constant theme: it keeps asking you to cram more and more things into the same number of tiles without giving you tools to improve efficiency or positive motivation to rethink layouts. (There is one notable counterexample, the step warehouse, which is worth highlighting because I wish the game had more improvements like that.)

This was a fun few hours of initial exploration, but the substantial amount of lategame content (including fighting off hostile NPCs which we haven't even talked about) just felt like a slog. And just to add insult to injury, the unlockable "reward" tiles like the Park and the Pond simply do nothing at all! What is the point.

https://pressakey.com/game,2023,6322,Before-We-Leave-Review,.html

Die Entwickler haben die Early-Access-Phase von Before We Leave gewinnbringend genutzt, um Fehler zu beheben, die Performance zu verbessern und einige neue Spielmodi zu implementieren. Die Luft ist also auch nach einem Endlosspiel noch nicht raus. Wer sich der Aufgabe gewappnet sieht, kann viele weitere Stunden in den fordernden Szenarien verbringen.

Was leider weiterhin Probleme verursacht, ist die Übersichtlichkeit. Kamerapositionen so zu fixieren wie sie es aktuell sind mögen der Performance gut tun, doch oft finde ich mich einfach nicht zurecht, um den Blick auf alle wesentlichen Dinge zu haben. Des Weiteren dürften die sich Gebäude von der Aufmachung her deutlicher unterscheiden. Wer schnell was beim Schneider oder Farmer nachschauen will, geht lieber über das Gebäudestatistik-Menü, anstatt die entsprechende Behausung auf der Karte anzuklicken. Denn dort etwas zu finden, zwischen dem ganzen Trubel auf mehreren Inseln und Planeten, wird ausnahmslos schwierig.

Doch neben diesen kleineren Lappalien ist Before We Leave ein absolut solider Zeitvertreib. Wer auf ruhige Management-Simulationen steht und keine gegnerischen Einheiten braucht, welche einem die mühsam aufgebauten Siedlungen zerschießen, ist hier sicherlich gut aufgehoben.