Before We Leave

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.

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

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...

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.