Long after past generations destroyed Earth, the remnants of civilization emerge from underground vaults to start over. Relics from the ancient world are scattered throughout the landscape restored to nature. Knowledge of the ancient world is largely lost, and these new inhabitants will have to start from scratch.
Before We Leave is a top-down, real-time city building game. The emphasis is on managing the well-being of the residents, minimizing air pollution, and exploring and colonizing new lands. The ultimate goal is to finally leave your own planet, explore the galaxy, and spread to other worlds. The primary loop is based on various forms of gathering of three general resource categories: food and water, building materials, and research gathered from remains of previous civilizations. Each of these general resource categories is divided into different types. Growing different foods increases people’s happiness (or peeps as they’re mentioned in the game). Different constructions require different building materials, which themselves may need to be transformed into more sophisticated states, such as turning iron into ingots. Research comes in multiple colors and can be used to unlock new buildings.
On a basic level, Before We Leave has a fairly simple, linear progression. Start with the simple tasks of building a hut, chopping down trees, and growing potatoes. As you research more technologies, you build new buildings, opening up the resources you need to build the next thing you research. . Other structures help to protect the nature around and throughout the settlement as well as eliminate this pollution or generally improve the mood of all. There are subgames that scale responsibly and sustainably without
Linear development of new technology is not necessarily a bad thing. It would be incredibly overwhelming if all the resources in Before We Leave were available from the start. Even so, there are many. Also, as you expand to multiple settlements, remembering which resource was producing which resource so that you can ship it to another settlement becomes a chore to manage. In fact, even knowing how much you have is obfuscated by the user interface. This he surfaces in two ways. First, the text is very small and there is no way to enlarge it, especially on handhelds. Secondly, there are so many resources that most of them are not visible on the main screen. All other resources other than wood, stone, and tools are two menus deep. It’s strange that basic information such as the amount of food is not shown, and that stones are always shown that the player can’t even access until multiple research projects are completed. but given the depth of the menu and the size of the text, I may have overlooked something.
Those concerns aside, Before We Leave handles very well when you’re really working on your own world. The left stick navigates the cursor on a hexagonal grid, while the right stick lets you quickly scroll the camera. Visually, the game loses some of the lighting effects and shadows of other versions, but the art style is still very nice and the resolution is sharp. Load times are a bit long, but once you get into the map it’s fine. The soundtrack by Benedict Nichols is nice and appropriately soothing with lots of acoustic guitar and Celtic influences.
Before We Leave is a very pleasant city-building game that’s addicting with its interface and ambitious scope. It’s a combination of limiting the space to display a lot of information and selecting all the wrong information to display in that space. When not fighting, the real moment-to-moment gameplay is very satisfying. It looks sharp and sounds great. There are some hurdles to getting over it, but it’s hard to deny the underlying charm of Before We Leave.
