If you ask me why we’re in this mess, why I had to make a review of this now or why are you even reading this in the first place then sadly enough I don’t really have a suitable answer to that. Developed by Balancing Monkey Games, Before We Leave was an indie title that came out back in May of 2020 for the Epic Games Store and followed a release for Steam a year later.
Fast forward to 2022, the game has basically let the consoles touch its own hexagonal grass especially where it really matters, the Nintendo Switch, where I happened to be reviewing this from.
However, the bigger question here is that it’s currently 2023, a year after the Nintendo Switch’s release and saying I’m a bit late is a huge understatement. And as much as I love to blame my 600-day-long addiction to Final Fantasy XIV Online that I happily got out of my system a month ago, well, let’s just say that this gamer is finally touching the grass albeit still digitally.
Before We Leave, unlike your typical run-of-the-mill city-building sims and strategy games, promotes itself as a non-violent city-builder with its own unique twist or should I say, its own revolution. This game which happened to be something that reminds me of the premise for Fallout, tackles the revival of civilisation after taking shelter underground for generations.
But having spent generations outside in the scorching heat of the sun or the feeling of the coarse sand in between their toes, these peeps as Before We Leave calls them, have to rebuild their own civilisation but without an idea on how to do it. Now this is where you come in as you guide your peeps to create a growing society of potato farmers while uncovering ancient technology to expand and prosper into new lands.
Thinking outside the box…
There’s something really interesting here that caught my attention when I decided to do this because unlike titles like City Skylines or Tropico just to name a few, Before We Leave doesn’t follow the same rules of the four-corner sandbox that these games are seen with. This one in particular takes its own direction with a honeycomb-style grid system where each one of these hexagonal tiles puts a mix of land and water to fill an entire spherical world for you to explore.
This puts a fascinating approach to the genre where it takes the phrase “the world is your playground” quite literally.
I really liked how it looks and in practice, these hexagonal tiles also offer some form of strategy where you can carefully plan out how and where you want to rebuild your massive cities and production facilities. To put things in context, every facility has to be connected with roads which also puts a greater emphasis on planning out better infrastructure to prevent wasting tiles from being unusable or having too many roads that you’re wasting precious tile space just to connect one or two buildings together with the rest of the city.
However, Before We Leave is easily accessible enough that this isn’t as huge of a problem while starting out and the fact that Before We Leave lets you customize your world settings to your liking means you can set it to get back the full resources used from a structure should you need to demolish a few of them much later. That sort of freedom to tailor your own experience sets a wider range of audience whether you’re a newcomer or a veteran to the genre.
From humble beginnings to… look out there’s space whales in them skies!!!
I think I’ve rattled on a bit too much so let’s get back to the main road which is the gameplay and how it works. Before We Leave starts you off in the main menu where you can choose to start a new game where you can customize and handpick some presets for your adventure. Meanwhile, you can also load from up to four different scenarios later down the line once you’ve learned the basics.
There’s a handy tutorial that helps you get the basics down although most of its structures and functions are pretty straightforward while the UI is clean enough that you won’t be seeing a whole lot of clutter that some games can be notorious for. Here, the idea is to get your initial settlement started up with some housing for your peeps, a suitable food and water source all while gathering resources like wood and stone among a few other things.
You’ll also eventually build a library to research lost technology and an explorer’s hut that would gather research points to be used in the library. This would eventually get you access to more advanced stuff to be able to explore new islands and other things that wouldn’t normally be available on your starting island.
There’s a robust amount of content to go through that you can only get access to by going through each of the new islands you get to explore. The tech tree which requires different coloured research points also means that you’re encouraged to explore the world and everything Before We Leave has to offer.
While the idea of it all seems daunting, just having the basics down that I’ve learned in an hour’s worth of tutorials, the experience was easy enough to understand and most of the newer stuff is easy to learn and how they function. This is especially true after repairing the ship and getting to colonize my second island to reap the rewards and its resources. And much like the initial island, you’re going to have to rebuild a stable community that can sustain itself and its needs before mining all the shiny stuff available in there.
Before We Leave’s spherical world full of hexagonal tiles is both charming as it is interesting. There’s a vibrant vibe to it all and there’s quite a lot to explore which has really been the main draw for me. You’ve got your starting island filled with mountains and grassy terrain but as soon as you get to leave the hexagonal corners of it all, you can eventually find new land with different tile sets such as deserts and snow biomes.
These pose their own sets of problems to deal with but having a full world and more to explore really brings that sort of excitement to push even further. However, exploration has also been the most stressful part of it. While it might just be my own problem, going through the spherical world of Before We Leave makes me nauseated while trying to map the entire world and it doesn’t help that Before We Leave controls are somewhat awkward too.
Bugs, glitches and maybe even more space whales…
Compared to the PC version of Before We Leave, the Nintendo Switch controls don’t give you an actual cursor instead you highlight a tile where you can move it around using the Joy-con’s thumbsticks. It is especially awkward to move around with them in the beginning but it does grow on you even for a bit after a while considering the Nintendo Switch’s screen does have touch functionality, it feels like a huge miss not to make use of that feature even if it’s something that we’ll only be able to use on handheld mode.
To add more to my frustrations, Before We Leave does suffer from some occasional bugs that hinder my progress.
The first instance was while trying to learn Before We Leave with the tutorial, after placing a structure, Before We Leave got me stuck in limbo… while I could move the camera around or change the game’s speed, it didn’t allow me to do anything else and I was permanently stuck on the menu that says “Place with A, rotate with X and press B to cancel” until I’ve decided to just close the application and lose a few minutes of progress.
This happened at least twice in the first few hours of my playthrough and considering that placing structures is what the entire game is all about, it had me worried the whole time whenever I needed to place new structures.
Thankfully you can set the auto-save feature to have an interval of 10 minutes which at best, you only get to lose that much should it happen right after the auto-save happens. There are also a couple of instances of being stuck in an infinite loading time while loading into my saves.
Conclusion
As I’ve said earlier in the review, I’ve just recently got out of my FFXIV addiction as I’d like to call it. It has been the main game I’ve played outside of reviews so having to actually experience more games I’ve missed in the past is a welcome change and Before We Leave despite its issues is also a huge part of it. I can’t say I’m the biggest fan of the genre however I do have my fair share of interest after having played through a handful of titles the genre has to offer.
This might not be my favourite out of all of them, but it does come close to being on top. There’s just something that a chill city-building strategy game has that really gives itself credit in my eyes. With it being easy to pick up and play, you can easily lose hours into it, forget about it and still be able to come back to it months later. So, if this is anything that you’re looking for, then I don’t see why you shouldn’t try. I wouldn’t however recommend a Nintendo Switch version when you can get it on every other platform unless portability was also your concern.
Before We Leave Video Review
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