Before We Leave Reviews

One of the most boring and annoying strategy games I ever played. And also one of the few I dropped in all my life (and dropped after such a short time), but I really couldn't suffer it anymore. You can only build along roads, which take up entire hexes, making it a pain to make anything remotely efficient, while you also can't cut too much forest because it has many effects. You have to micromanage tradings between islands and planets to avoid that just a small bump in the road breaks your entire production chain. And there are lots of bumps, because in each island you're missing one or more sources of resources and need to have them shipped from elsewhere, always paying attention to what every single building needs to see if you can get it. Very frustrating, annoying, and boring. Your citizens can't be manually assigned to tasks and they even ignore the high/low priorities you set on buildings.

Before We Leave sounds and looks like an interesting concept, but in reality it's not really a fun game. It's missing "something" and I just couldn't get hooked despite liking the genre. There are some minor bugs and the optimisation is poor, but in all this game is just quite boring experience.

If you like strategy games but want an opportunity to relax, this game is great. A cute and simplistic style hides that the tutorial's gentle introduction will ease you into a game that actually has a lot of depth to its systems – though never feels overwhelming. It strikes an excellent balance of increasing scope and complexity while keeping the learning curve easy. It's hard to think of a good comparison with existing games or even genres: it's part city builder, part logistics management like Factorio (though arguably closer to the much older game The Settlers), part colony builder, with a dash of the feel of 4X games (technically 3X, as it has explore, expand, exploit, but no exterminate). There is challenge, in terms of thinking about how you will fit things in, but even getting it wrong usually means slower unhappy "peeps" (yes, they went with "peeps"), rather than outright failure. Sometimes logistics between islands or planets can seem frustrating, but you can manually intervene if that load of essentials still hasn't reached its destination. In the later game, there are creatures who will do damage, but all are able to be mitigated. You might get sick of seeing "Buildings must be placed next to a road", but it's a small bother in an otherwise really smooth experience. This is a game that lets you play at your own pace but which always seems to have something for you to do, so hasn't grown dull. After not even finishing the first playthrough, I have already wishlisted the creators' next title, as they have created a world I enjoy playing in. Bonus points from me for the developers being indies from here in Aotearoa New Zealand, and the subtle inclusion of the occasional boat named after local wildlife.

An alright game. Decent few hours of a timesink if you like colony builders/strategy, nothing to die over. 7.5/10

I adore this game and have sunk many hours into it, however there are some bugs and other issues with space shipping that make this game frustrating to play in the long run. There has been a bug I have been experiencing for years where the amount ships will attempt to load will increase infinitely for as long as I have the ship selected, this allows me to have ships load 1000 milk for example. This makes shipping between planets extremely difficult to deal with. When said bug doesn't occur, spaceships will sit in orbit "looking for shipments" but never attempting to load, even in cases where one planet is trying to export a good it has excess of to a planet that is trying to import, the spaceships do not move. I find it hard to recommend this game until these issues are taken care of, as space shipping is key to the later stages of the game. Given how long it has been, it doesn't look like the devs will fix this, especially now that they are working on their next game.