TLDR: A peaceful colony management game that doesnāt put its best foot forward, seeming tedious, but improves in the mid and late game. General Thoughts/Overview: Before We Leave (BWL) is an extremely gentle colony management game. You lead your āpeepsā as you emerge from an underground shelter used to hide from an unspecified disaster on the planetās surface. Rebuild society, rediscover technology, and reclaim the stars as you learn from the past and try to do better than the ancients who fled below ground. There are no real hostile entities, at least in my play through, though there ARE antagonists you need to work to overcome, but the biggest difficulty is fighting the midgame lull. Pros: [*] Super peaceful and gentle. This is a very relaxing game to play. [*] BWL is also extremely stripped back. Most of what you need to do is simple in nature and the game is quite easy to learnā¦ That said, it was very pleasing to go back and optimise my first world as I was building up my 5th, using everything I had learned along the way. [*] Once you get into the flow, and overcome the initial complexities, BWL gets to shine. I almost gave up on it out of boredom, but once I got through the tough times it became extremely easy to play and addictive. Cons: [*] SO. VERY. DULL . The opening portion of the game, learning to set up the trade routes, making everything work, needing tech, needing to go back to change things around as your tech improvesā¦ UGH. Itās so tedious and mind numbing. Thereās no real stakes so thereās no real challengeā¦ Until the planet starts getting eaten by space whalesā¦ which sounds like the worst lie, but isnāt. [*] The gameplay loop has been too oversimplified in many places, making it often unsatisfying to play through, until you are far enough along to have everything running smoothly, then itās the joy of expanding. [*] BWL dumps a huge amount of info on you at the very start, and does a very poor job of teaching you how to optimise or remind you of things. It also doesnāt present information to you in great ways, doubling down on the tedium as you have to eyeball everything. Suggested improvements: [*] The biggest QoL improvements I can see would be the game tracking if you do multiple steps in a row towards something which can be done easily. For example, it was as I was writing my notes for improvements I wanted to point out that the road improvements would be much more pleasant if you didnāt need 3-4 clicks per tileā¦ then it hit me to check the interface and low and behold, there was an easier way. If the game went āoh hey, youāre doing this super inefficient thing, thereās an easier wayā¦ā that would be great. [*] Another useful QoL improvement would be if I only had to set export limits, and warehouses would auto fill their stocks, instead of me needing to set import/export quantities on every island. My cement factory is happily sat idle from the bajilion cement it can make because I didnāt notice I forgot to add it to the import tab? Frustrating. I built the damned hub so it would export to fill the spaces in warehouses all over the solar system, I dislike having to tell every port to import it, and it clutters the screen needlessly. [*] Make everything matter more. Bad clothes? Gloom? Only potatoes? Who cares? Seriously, who cares? It literally doesnāt matter at any point after the first couple of islands. The only consequence is slowed productionā¦ once you have two sources thatās irrelevant. There is no downside to peeps being unhappy, make me care. Overall Recommendation: This is a real tough one. For the vast majority of my playtime Iād have given BWL the thumbs downā¦ There are very clear reasons why only around half of players reached a new island, a quarter reached a new planet, a tenth met a whale, a twentieth made it to the rim or core, and only half of them finished the gameā¦ But now? By the end of my play through? I think it has to be a thumbs up, because Iāll be back to play again. Not right away, but some unspecified time in the future when I want a gentle colony builder, Iāll be backā¦ and that in and of itself is essentially a recommendation. So if you like peaceful, simple, and gentle colony management gamesā¦ then this is for you. Iād say itās easy enough to be babyās first colony management experience, but the grinding early game and ridiculous minutia in the most annoying ways possible might put budding colony managers offā¦ As such it does need some experience with the genre to get the best experience from. I do not recommend this game if youāre after a strong story experience, if you want strong challenge, if you want meaningful choices, or if you want something fast paced and pewpew. I definitely donāt recommend this if youāve not got the patience for a long haul and no eye for detailā¦ but if thatās you Iād be surprised you read a long form review for a genre that probably drives you mentalā¦ For me, while much of BWL is left wanting, I enjoyed it once I had everything up and running and could just cook. That combined with my inevitable return, and it gets the old thumbs up. [url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/44852412/]My curator page with reviews by genre. In case you want to find more games, or even reviews, like this one.
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