Before We Leave

BFL sends out quite some Anno vibes. You live on a planet with multiple islands of different spec, and there are people to keep happy. There are a multitude of things that improve or decrease happiness of your folk. Over time you develop new skills and will also be able to travel the stars, which is fun, as you can find more islands out there. You will also find some natural" and "supernatural"things going on, which you learn to cope with. Every time you think you have figured it out, the game comes up with something new. Some tasks obviously are a bit repetitive as it is the case in any city builder. But the bulkload of content really keeps you motivated to start a new settlement on yet another planet. At the same time the economy is very stable and you don't need to stress too much and can just watch your people or cows doing their job. If you are annoyed by the supernatural threads, you can also disable them. The game is very stable, I did not see any bugs except for one animation. The trade mode works well, you just say how much of what resource you want to have on which island and your trade vessels will make sure that all ports taking part have at least the given amount (even over multiple hops!). With the zero and infinite rule you can move all your stuff to a central hub, too. One minor flaw: the energy system could be better. Renewables do have a way too high storage capacity and production rate. It's like there is a nuclear plant and a huge battery array hidden in each solar cell. This makes them much too strong and the day/night cycle have no effect. I think the storage should be lowered by 90% at least. There also is a pollution system in place, messing up the once beatiful wilderness. When it gets too bad your buildings switch off. I want to send in my people with protective gear and turn the whole planet into a wasteland, while my main folk is thriving in a paradise somewhere else. But that's not an option...maybe I just haven't found it yet.

The game looks and feels pretty funny and the beginning is intriguing. You build up a small settlement, discover the world, explore new technologies, build more facilities. All that is town building standard fun. However, the game implemented a few features that make it deliberately, artificially slow and tedious. You need to micromanage the flow of ressources between diefferent islands on the same planet, need to build the same base facilities on one island over and over again until you reach the space ship, rinse and repeat. It is actually a shame, because as promising the first hour of the game is, as boring and ultimately a chore it becomes quickly after.

On my desktop PC (Ryzen 7 8700G, 64GB RAM, nVidia 4070 Ti Super) the game crashes after 15-30 minutes and brings the whole OS down, need to hard reset. Other, more demanding games like Cyberpunk 2077 work fine on the same PC, and the computer is very stable otherwise, it’s unlikely to be a hardware issue. Does not happen on a laptop with CPU-integrated AMD GPU, though. Cloud synchronization is unreliable, destroys save files by synchronizing in the wrong direction.

Fun grind with neat progress. Great way to spent time