Before We Leave Review
I can’t count how many hours of my life I’ve spent playing games in the Civilization series and other games in the 4X genre, mostly out of fear of the answer since it has to be an astronomical number. The hypnotic effect these games have on me with their constant progress at a carefully managed drip-feed pace has a way of inducing an almost trance-like state that keeps me hooked for hours. The only thing capable of breaking this delirium is the other players or factions in the game competing with me for supremacy, because I’m a wildly inept military commander. This means that I stick to 4X games that allow for alliances and cooperative victories. But last week, a new 4X-style game was released that had a different solution to my problems: taking away the opponents.
In Before We Leave, players take control of a recovering civilization only recently reemerged from a network of underground bunkers. The tutorial tries to be coy and only vaguely reference the reason why the people of this unnamed world hid their entire civilization beneath the planet’s crust, but it’s obviously the massive space whales that periodically graze on planets that are featured so heavily in the game’s marketing materials. With the danger, apparently, passed and the people free to walk on the surface world again, the players must guide them as they learn to live aboveground and help them reclaim the world left by their ancestors. In the process, players follow all the same familiar steps of other 4X games, but with only 3 of the Xs: eXplore, eXpand, and eXploit. EXterminate is left out of Before We Leave because the game inhabits an entirely empty planet and solar system. So while players grow their civilization, the only limits are their own urban planning capabilities and the colossal void whales, but those are less like enemies and more like natural disasters.
The thing that stands out most to me about Before We Leave is that it feels like it is of two minds about everything. On the game’s Epic Games Store page, the game says players can “Play, chill out, and expand the fabric of your reborn society at your own pace” but there are actually quite a few external pressures applied to players throughout the course of the game. The most noteworthy is the aforementioned space whales, who will periodically drift past a planet, decimating the nearest portion of the planet’s surface with their passing, causing unpredictable and massive damage to whatever supply chain might have been present. Beyond that, there are terrestrial problems to stress the player. The player’s citizens, or “peeps” as they’re referred to in game, can become extremely unhappy for a variety of reasons including not having enough food, not having enough water, having a job that’s hard, working in a polluted environment, or having too many neighbors. Once the peeps are unhappy, they start working at reduced efficiency or even stop working altogether, shutting down whatever industry they’re part of. While I would be just as unhappy as the peeps in these situations, I’m not clear why a game that wants players to “chill” even bothered including these potential stressors. It feels like a spa that has an employee fire a starting pistol periodically unless the customers are keeping an eye out for them. Further contradicting themselves, the developers have included pollution as a mechanic, seemingly as a nod to the disruptive and often harmful effects of unchecked industry, but then simultaneously tries to dismiss these concerns by saying they can be fixed by a few people with mops. Possibly the strangest of all of these features is that players are able to disable the penalties from overpopulation, but not for limited food and water or excessive pollution. This seems to me like the developers understood that peeps’ unhappiness could prevent the player from “chilling” as they play the game, but not anything else. If developers want to make a hard game, that’s fine, but I would’ve preferred it if the folks at Balancing Monkey Games had picked a side instead of straddling this fence.
A more positive but equally strange feature is the game’s research tree. By gathering materials left over from the ancient world, players are able to learn and research new sciences and technologies, enabling them to invent new things and grow as a civilization. A lot of these new technologies were about gathering and utilizing new resources, like iron or crude oil, but there were other, more interesting technologies that allowed new utility structures or ways to upgrade existing facilities to better suit the player’s needs and I always appreciate games that let me tailor my experiences. However, the order in which new technologies are unlocked in Before We Leave are utterly nonsensical. For some reason, incredibly banal technologies are often locked behind genuinely difficult scientific achievements. Before a player’s peeps are able to learn to sew clothes, they must first learn how to smelt sand into glass. I learned to sew when I was about 14 and, though I had the help of a sewing machine, I’m fairly confident that putting needle to thread is much easier, not to mention safer, than melting down sand into a functional pane of glass. Even more confusing is the fact that players must achieve interplanetary space travel before learning how to bake, irrigate crops, raise farm animals, or even make music. I understand that the peeps are coming at science a little sideways thanks to the abandoned tools of their ancestors, but I’m pretty sure every human child is banging on pots and pans while singing a rudimentary song before they even understand the concept of outer space. Weird as this tech tree is, it never actually hindered my time with Before We Leave, it just regularly made me exclaim in bewilderment.
Before We Leave is, as far as I can tell, the first game made by developer Balancing Monkey Games and I think that shows. The game has a lot of odd choices and strange quirks, but at the end of the day it’s not a bad game, just a game that doesn’t seem to know what it is. I think if you want to play a relaxing city-builder game, you’ll probably be better off with Islanders because it’s got a much better grasp on relaxing gameplay and costs about 25% of what Before We Leave costs, but if you want a more expansive experience with a hearty helping of 4X game I don’t see why you shouldn’t buy Before We Leave. Though, I do suggest you wait for a lower price than the current $20.
Buy this game on sale
It’s worth playing, just not at the price they’re asking
