Before we Leave PC Review-Rediscover and rebuild civilization
Gaming News
By Admin - May 10, 2020

Games can be tiring, especially when it comes to action-based, violent games. At times, all that you need to do is crash and play something peaceful that could calm your mind. If such is the case, then Balancing Monkey has got you covered with their most recent release, Before We Leave.

Where did it all begin?

Before We Leave is just another city building game in store, only better. Not that the storyline of a city building game matters that much, but the game is based on some underground sims, known as peeps, who have stayed away from the surface for so long that they have forgotten what the world feels like. Luckily, their resurfacing coincides with your purchase of the game and you can help build their civilization again. All they know is how to grow potatoes!

Anyways, a little off track, but how can someone call the main race of the game peeps? I wonder how it really went down at the studio when the developers sat down to brainstorm ideas regarding the names that they could give to these miniature characters and came up with peeps.

So far, the transition of peeps from underground to the surface feels smooth enough. But some reasons forced the peeps to move underground, and now that they are back, they don’t know a thing about survival and they are bound to repeat the old mistakes that led them to move underground earlier.

Getting Your House in Order

The game features a typical city-building gameplay. You will need to collect resources and then utilize these resources to build something, and that something would produce another resource which is how you’ll eventually end up building a civilization. For an example, to gather wood, you will need to send some peeps with an axe to hunt for trees. Once you have gathered sufficient wood, you can use it to build mines. Those mines would in return produce stone. Stone is then needed to build an iron smelter which then produces iron. As the list grows long, keeping track of resources becomes more difficult, but this all the game requires of you: to keep a check and maintain a balance of the resources you have at hand. To make it easier for you to manage the resources, you are blessed with an opportunity to trade between neighboring cities to send out the unwanted resources and bring in useful resources. There are chances that you mind need ships and spaceships at times to go on with the task of trading. Was that spaceships that you just read? Well, yes you did!

We have come a long way from the old city building games in terms of gameplay, soundtracks, and graphics. However, the thing that still bugs me is that we cannot place the buildings freely. There always is a defined boundary for each building and nothing else could be placed inside of it. It’s like spreading the city over a grid and in the case of Before We Leave, the grid is in the form of hexagons.

Other than the few drawbacks that the game has, it is a pretty nifty game. Considering the fact that it is an indie game, the developers still did a pretty good job. The game cannot be played for a very long time before getting bored because of a lack of challenges, but then again what else were you expecting for $9.

Before We Leave, get yourself a cup of coffee, make yourself comfortable, and get building.