A commendable first effort by indie studio Balancing Monkey Games, Before We Leave is a visually distinct city builder on a cosmic scale. It tasks the omnipotent player with leading a long-dormant species of humanoids out of their subterranean shelter, where they've hid for centuries after a near-extinction event ended civilization as they once knew it. With little guidance needed thanks to the game's relative ease for players of all genre experience, they must be led to explore and re-colonize their ancestors' lost worlds while rediscovering their past.
It's a fairly dark premise with some clear in-game allusions to real-world fears of catastrophe like pollution, climate change, and indifferent alien threats, but Before We Leave maintains a lighthearted disposition and mostly focuses on gameplay rather than thematics. It's even somewhat funny at first. The bizarrely named, player-controlled "Peeps" have lost all cultural memory of their antecedents, seeing the likes of mundane structures like ancient skyscrapers as iron ore-rich "mountains," and they ironically begin to immediately repeat the destructive processes of self-pollution that helped drive them underground in the first place. That said, it's otherwise rather bland, but there's an undeniable sense of The Outer Wilds-like mystery that crescendos as players make their way off their starting continent for the first time.
Those tonal echoes reverberate off of a greater focus on its light city building, and it's a mixed bag of ambition, well-meaning mistakes, and downright frustration. The greatest impression on it'll leave on players is with its gorgeous art style and smooth animations, which make even well-explored hex tile maps look fresh. Also somewhat unique to Before We Leave is its identity as a city builder with an interplanetary late game. Unlike complicated 4X games like Endless Space though, the process of evolving from a handful of starting Peeps and a few simple structures to a technologically complex system of planets with dense, bustling cities happens quickly thanks to the game's relatively simple mechanics and respect for players' time - sitting around and waiting for stuff to happen isn't Before We Leave's style.
Its high accessibility and fairly low stakes (Peeps can become unhappy and lower productivity, but they can't die) will probably quickly bore veteran city builder and sim players. Before We Leave basically plays itself outside of players' ability to place, demolish, and prioritize resource-collecting structures; Peeps can't be individually assigned and roads auto-connect themselves into an unsightly tangled mess. Also, tech tree is far from complex or exciting. That said, researched upgrades are limited until players begin to navigate their starting planet, and the exploratory feeling of striking out from safety to discover all-new biomes on the opposite side of the planet is exhilarating despite the lack of danger. This also opens up the need to multi-task, which gives players a good excuse to switch to the above handsome orbital perspective.
While it's mainly only genre veterans that'll be irked at Before We Leave's overall lack of difficulty and disrespect for tightly managed supply chains, even casual newcomers to city building will find themselves annoyed by the game's more glaring blemishes. Its greatest sin is that it has a nasty habit of hiding, obfuscating, or otherwise poorly addressing the visibility of certain important systems. Constantly, players will find themselves asking: What amount of living space and arrangements do Peeps need to fight a city's overpopulation? How much do certain resource tiles collect and how quickly? How long do Peeps sleep? Better yet, what time is it? When players piddle around in the dark waiting for Peeps to wake up or face the dilemma of how to control a population of irritable immortals, it overshadows the game's better moments.
Before We Leave's a surprisingly well-optimized, visually pleasing, and refreshingly relaxing city builder that excels at making players feel like reclaimers of a massive, interplanetary empire, but it has many gameplay issues to iron out in its full release before it can live up to its own ambitions. The gripes noted herein are all present in an alpha build, so it's possible that Balancing Monkey already addressed these and other concerns between then and now. If not, though, the subtle makings of a personality may not be able to atone for the fact that its mysterious, mellow tone is undermined by frequent annoyances.
Before We Leave will be available for PC on May 8, 2020. Screen Rant was provided an Epic Games Store code for the purpose of this review.