Before We Leave – building, exploration, and fun!

The Game

Before We Leave is a real-time city building game with a twist. The premise of the game is that your civilization is reborn after taking shelter from an impending disaster. You follow in the footsteps of your ancestors, discovering lost technologies and learning a little about your predecessors as you progress. Rapidly you’ll find that one town is not enough. You’ll need to colonise multiple islands on multiple planets in order to progress. Each island comes with its own challenges whether resource, flora, fauna, environmental or build restriction based (unstable land, less/more fertile soil etc.). Unique and unexpected discoveries will continuously reveal themselves as you explore and progress. This provides quite a rewarding experience.

Initially, the focus of the game feels like simply staying alive and building up is the challenge. This rapidly shifts towards managing logistical challenges. Maintaining the happiness of the ever-increasing expectations of your peeps whilst exploring becomes a balancing act. Sad people are unproductive people so neglecting their happiness can be a slippery slope especially as your logistics chains grow. It quickly becomes common to have ships or airships distributing resources among islands and then interplanetary trading ships exchanging resources between planets. Exploration is one particularly fun aspect of the game as it can extremely be rewarding and uncover some truly unexpected surprises.

Progression

In the beginning, you start on a single island. You’ll find a broken ship that needs repair in order to use, completing these repairs will enable you to explore your home planet and colonise a second island. After a bit of exploration, you’ll soon be able to build your own ships. Space exploration begins in a similar manner. As you explore you’ll find piles of technology left behind by your ancestors. You can study these at the library in order to unlock items in the research tree. You’ll be generating power and producing a wide variety of resources in no time. These new resources will enable you to build more advanced buildings and gather new materials. Eventually, you’ll use these to build vessels and colonise other planets and defend yourself from unexpected threats!

One thing which I found particularly cool was to have colonised my third planet, seemingly explored it completely then a new vehicle allowed me to discover something new on my starting planet! These little (and not so little) surprises kept me truly very engaged as I was always on the lookout for the next one. Exploring comes with its risks. From time to time it will reveal a hazard or challenge, sometimes overcoming a challenge will be rewarded. Some challenges however will become a persistent pain for you and your colonists on a given island.

The Challenges

Colonising new islands

Kicking off new colonies is fun as you begin each new colony in a resource-constrained manner. This means you need to put thought into planning. Otherwise, you’ll soon find yourself out of tools and progress will grind to a halt! Most islands are different in their own unique way. Each island will require a different approach depending on what it has to offer and what your current settlements can provide. This means that you’re not just copying and pasting the same mass of buildings each time.

Exploring new lands can be hazardous

Besides the logistical concerns of managing multiple settlements which span various islands and planets, you’ll soon discover new and often unexpected challenges. Some challenges will present hazards which if not countered may provide significant setbacks on that island/planet. In one instance a hazard wiped out the inhabitants of a new settlement. This meant I had to send a second colony ship to recover it. Most of the time however the remaining peeps will be able to recover from the damage caused quite rapidly.

Countering hazards often takes the form of new buildings which must be researched. These structures construction requirements vary from trivial to huge for some of the more monolithic counters. At least one of these hazards levels up as time goes on even if countered. This aspect really makes you consider the benefits of colonising an island at a given time as sometimes preparation and developing on other islands first so as to be able to better counter a threat is the better approach.

Once you know what to look for you’ll be able to spot and avoid or mitigate many terrestrial hazards. However, not all threats are terrestrial in nature and one particular threat will no doubt keep you on your toes.

Roads, so many roads

One particularly prominent mechanic in Before We Leave is that building placement requires an adjacent road. This means that road planning is critical to the effective use of space in your settlements. With my early settlements, my road placement was less than optimal, this resulted in some awkward routes for my peeps and will require significant redesign as on a given island landmass rapidly becomes a constraining factor. My first settlement is a great example of how poor road planning can result in a LOT of space wasted on roads as I could almost halve the amount of space they occupy with better planning. The default difficulty setting thankfully refunds buildings demolition at their full cost which makes mistakes like mine quite forgiving.

How Does it run on modest hardware?

When playing the game on the following PC:

• i7 4770
• 16GB RAM
• GTX 1060
• SATA SSD

I played at 1920×1080 on the high pre-set, all graphics settings were left at default.

The game played very well. I noted stutters when toggling between planet and space views. However, this does not significantly impact gameplay as this is purely a transition animation. The game hovered around 33 FPS on a highly populated planet. I could not get the game to dip below 28 FPS at max game speed, zooming around like a fool on my most populated planet. Frame rates would rise to 40 FPS+ on less populated worlds. Needless to say, I had no significant complaints regarding performance as even 30 FPS is sufficient for a game like this.

The bugs

The developers have done a great job of polishing this game overall. While reviewing this game I only ran into minor issues with regard to naming save games and an issue where saved games disappeared when exiting using alt + f4. The TLDR; is you should create new saves save by using the numbered slots. After saving ALWAYS exit via the menu. I don’t recommend exiting via alt + f4 as you likely will lose saves. A detailed rundown of the issue is provided in the next paragraph

Save game woes.

Autosave works seamlessly and on Game Pass my cloud saves were transferred between PCs without issue. However, manually saving a game I found unfortunate quirks which can be problematic or confusing.

Regardless of what is typed in the “Game Name” box my save was always called “Fade”. When using the “Save Game” button as opposed to a numbered slot this ALWAYS overwrote my save called “Fade. The numbered slots would create a new save game named based on which slot I had clicked ie ” save8″ if I’d clicked “New Save 8”.

Exiting the game always prompts if you’d like to overwrite yet it doesn’t indicate which game will be overwritten, this seems to create/overwrite the Autosave as opposed to a named/numbered save.

Those quirks I discovered early on and didn’t mind too much. The bigger issue came when I alt + f4’d after saving manually so that I could cook some dinner. I verified my save was in the “Load Game” menu and was confident it was stored, saw no saving indicator so gave it a sec and then I hit the shortcut key to close the game without concern. After dinner, I found I’d lost 25+ minutes of gameplay. In that time I’d colonised another island, and done quite a bit of exploring. Of course a lost save like that prompted additional investigation!

From digging into this a bit the #1 takeaway I think is don’t trust the “Load Game” menu as an indicator if your game is saved or not.

Testing the save issues

• I hit save, checked the “Load Game” menu then hit alt + f4 consistently which resulted in lost games
• Then I saved the game, checked the “Load Game” menu, waited 5+ minutes, hit alt + f4 and the saved game was retained.
• After that I clicked an empty numbered slot to save in, saved in a second empty numbered slot, checked the “Load Game” menu and hit alt + f4 quickly after. Both save games were retained.
• I found that exiting via the menu seems to write all unwritten manual saves to disk.
  • This was true whether you say yes or no to saving the game upon exit
  • Selecting yes to save when you exit seems to create/overwrite the Autosave.

So the moral of the story is don’t use alt + f4 whilst playing Before We Leave and if you do consider reducing autosave duration. I have zero issues with deferred writing of data to disk, it’s better than say the issues I had with Rift Breaker but a save progress indicator would have been nice.

Conclusion

Before We Leave is a fun game, exploring is rewarding, progression is quite steady and setbacks are forgiving enough so as not to discourage the player when playing on default difficulty. It presents evolving challenges and has quite a nice graphical style that matches the tone of the game. If you enjoy games like Banished, Tropico, Civilisation, Transport Tycoon then I think there’s a good chance you’ll find Before We Leave enjoyable. It’s not directly comparable to any one of these games but combines real-time city-building, with balancing the needs of your population without requiring excessive micro-management in its own unique way. I recommend giving Before We Leave a try as whilst the save issues were a tad annoying once off they are easily understood and mitigated and overall the game is great fun!

Before We Leave is currently available on Xbox Game Pass PC. At the time of writing it’s $17.37 AUD with 40% off on Steam, Epic Also has the game for $29.99 AUD so overall it’s a very reasonably priced game! Thank you Balancing Monkey Games and Team 17 for the enjoyable experience and well done on a great game!