Welcome to my review of Before We Leave on the PlayStation 5. The game was brought to us by developers Balancing Monkey Games (This is their debut game) and published by Team17 (Worms, OverCooked!).
The game was originally released for PC and Xbox in 2021, with its release to PlayStation being more recent on the 4th of April 2022. It is a casual strategy game where players must build up a city in a cozy corner of the universe.
Before We Leave is now available on the Xbox and PlayStation families of consoles, PC, and macOS.
Keep Calm And Carry On Building
So will Before We Leave keep my city building bug at bay? Or should I have left it floating in space? Continue reading to find out. You can also check out our previous reviews.
The Game
Upon starting Before We Leave we are given four options. Continue, new game, scenarios, and load the game. New game will start you in the normal style of gameplay that the developers want you to play. Scenarios will mix things up, change the formula and give even the experienced players a run for their money.
Starting a new game will take you into the sandbox world for you to start creating your city. Fortunately, there is a tutorial mode for the new players to get to grips with the game. It’s not too complicated though so don’t be afraid to jump in. If you’ve played strategy or city-builder games you’ll already know the basic concepts.
Once you start your new game you will be able to crack on with building your humble new city. One thing I immediately noticed was how the control scheme actually works very well on the PlayStation Dual Sense controller. It felt very natural in this game. Some strategy games feel a little clunky when it comes to controls on consoles and this is not one of them.
We must ensure we have enough housing for our “peeps”, if we do not, we can not grow. So one of the first tasks is to build housing for the peeps. Once this is done you can then build other constructions such as a well to provide the peeps with water, farms for food, and woodcutters to get wood. You get the idea, there is much more than just these few building types.
You unlock loads of new buildings as you’re going through the game. Research is done through the research tree which you can see below.
Players will have to keep an eye on their resources at the top of the screen. Another thing players will need to do is make sure the city has a good supply of wood and stone. Not only that, you’ll need to keep a good supply of tools that can be built in the Transmogrifier building, once you have built it of course.
You’ll need a lot of patience with Before We Leave because it can feel a bit slow at times. There is a particular setting that can help you through this which allows you to speed up time whilst playing. Obviously, this will speed things up for you, we can step up to 2x or 4x. We can also go the other way and slow time down. We can go at 0.5x, 0.25x, and pause.
Look & Sound
I actually quite like the graphics on Before We Leave. Especially the little peeps that are living in your city, zoom in and you’ll see what I mean. They’re adorable. The game has some nice graphical effects and the texture work is pretty decent also.
The audio in before we leave is what you would expect of a strategy/city-builder. Before We Leave has quite a chilled-out soundtrack. The sound effects themselves are rather basic. This doesn’t affect the quality of the game itself, in my opinion.
Length & Replayability
As we have come to learn with city-building games, they last players an absolute ton of hours. The game will give you many hours of fun whilst playing. Should it be through the “new game” or taking on the challenging scenarios.
Not only do you get a boatload of hours of gameplay with Before We Leave, but players also have the option to unlock 56 trophies should they wish to do so. That is including the platinum trophy.
Conclusions
Before We Leave is a great game that is not too difficult to get the hang of. Should you wish to check it out, you can purchase it on the PlayStation Store, or, you can play it on PC or Xbox right now if you’re an Xbox Game Pass subscriber.
The game doesn’t have any health warnings when starting up, which is fantastic for those who unfortunately suffer from photosensitive epilepsy.
I give Before We Leave a score of 9/10.
A code was kindly provided for us to review this.
