Hi there, here is the Zap. In this My Time at Sandrock Review, you'll get a sneak peek
at the new sandbox RPG crafting game that's a direct sequel
to the popular My Time at Portia. I'll tell you how it plays, what's in it and
at the end there's a rating from me. But most of all, I want to give you all the information
you need to decide for yourself if you can enjoy the game.
Sandrock is developed and self-published by the Chinese-American studio Pathea Games
. So this is an indie game. So far there are already some titles from this team
with Ever Forward, Planet Explorer and My Time at Portia. I got a
free trial key, thanks for that. This shouldn't affect
my rating though, as I always review all games with
how I would feel if I had paid full price.
► Background - successor to My Time at Portia My Time at Sandrock is the evolution
of My Time at Portia. This is a fairly well-known game that was first
released back in 2018. It combines apocalyptic mood with cute graphics, child-friendly story
with farm sim and craftsman gameplay. It also offers all sorts of unique ideas and
an extensive story. You could roughly compare it to Stardew Valley or Harvest Moon.
The focus is on collecting, crafting, numerous quests and social relationships
with the town's residents. But there are also fights, caves and mines that
have to be explored like dungeons and tons of events and side activities.
The game is now available for all gaming platforms, from Steam and Epic
Games for PC, to iOS, Android, Playstation, Xbox and macOS. Portia has already
sold millions of copies and has been rated in the upper mid-range to top range.
► Game Type - Sandbox Crafting RPG In My Time at Sandrock we start with
quite an extensive character creation. Where we get gender selection,
different hairstyles, a few different faces,
and more options to make our very own avatar for the game.
And crafting is one of the main pursuits that we will pursue throughout the game
. We collect material and use it to build the first tools. Little by little,
we are building more and more machines to refine the raw materials into higher-quality components.
Activities such as farming and farm building, animal husbandry, exploring dungeons,
hunting monsters and bosses follow later. The game is constantly expanding with
mounts and vehicles, building houses and many other options . There are also mini games and events such as a HaudenLukas,
arcade machines, sand fishing, dance competitions, slide races or sand buggy races.
Every action in the game, regardless of whether it's chopping stones, killing opponents, crafting objects or
completing quests, brings us experience points. And so we gradually rise in levels.
With the levelups we get more life, higher damage but also knowledge points.
We invest our knowledge points in the four skill trees, which
are sorted by collecting, workshop, combat and social. Here we get improvements
for faster leveling or more resources and we can make decisions on how we
want to customize our character. For example, there are different specializations
for different weapons in the combat tree, such as dagger, sword, spear or ranged combat.
Through gathering and crafting, we gradually become better crafters. This allows us
to fulfill increasingly difficult orders from the Bulletin Board of the Artisan Guild. We
can work our way through a complex tree of more than 100 materials and currently
over 40 different tools and finishing machines.
And since almost everything costs money, we urgently need the higher orders for more income.
► Gameplay - World and Characters The village of Sandrock is located
in a large desert, making water a particularly scarce resource. And we
quickly learn that we have to show special respect for the water and the few plants
, otherwise there will be trouble with the sheriff.
Sandrock itself consists of about 25 buildings, most of which we can enter. People live everywhere
here , because the city is filled with numerous personalities that we gradually get
to know. But not everything right at the beginning, because when we are a newcomer,
not everyone talks to us and some houses are still locked at the beginning.
The long list of people is great. On the one hand, they appear again and again in quests
as clients and interlocutors, both in the story quests
and in the crafting tasks on the bulletin board. On the other hand
, we need some of them for certain services, such as research, shops, etc.
And we can also build a relationship with every single NPC in the game that
ranges from completely irrelevant to romance. We can improve this attitude towards ourselves through conversations,
games, quests and gifts. And many of the NPCs unlock different perks
for being friends with them, or even loving them.
The village actually has a mayor, but is currently
led by the priestess of the Church of Light. This "religion" probably
developed during the time underground, more about that in the story section.
In the surrounding area there are all sorts of old ruins, caves and junkyards. There we can find relics,
data discs containing ancient knowledge and in general many of the very scarce resources and
rare machine parts. And in addition to wild animals that we can hunt, there are
also direct monsters, robots and crooks that we have to deal with.
► Gameplay - Story At the beginning of the game we reach
the small desert town of Sandrock, where we have been hired to replace the village's handyman who
is retiring. Because they don't trust us that much, someone
else was hired for the same job at the same time, so there's constant competition here.
The world of Sandrock is post-apocalyptic. Because centuries ago there was a huge catastrophe that
killed large parts of the population and forced the remaining residents underground.
Only in the last few decades have other people dared to return to the surface. During
the time underground, the religion of the Church of Light was formed, which
comes with a lot of optimism and worship of the sun, but I don't want to spoil more about it.
As society was rebuilt on the rubble of a destroyed culture,
we can examine these ruins of the old world. However, these are often
high-tech systems that are actually sunken in the sand. There we find old relics and scrap from the
lost world, which in the end could also be modern technology from our point of view.
So there is a lot of junk to find in the desert that
we can extract resources from. But also very rare machine parts or data carriers that
we can give to our researchers to develop new crafting recipes. Also,
as collectible items, there are pieces of ancient artifacts to be found, such as the remains of extinct animals or statues,
which we can assemble in the museum once we've found complete sets.
There is a big main story that takes us through the world, introduces the inhabitants in more detail and
always brings new tasks with it. We also get numerous letters in
our mailbox, in which old friends or residents of the village send us messages
and tell little stories. And then there are all sorts of topics of conversation
when we talk to the sand rockers, there are additional little stories here.
► Technology, graphics, sound My Time at Sandrock is
built in the Unity Engine, which ensures a stable substructure and largely good performance. It crashed twice in about
25 hours of testing, but since the version I'm testing is an
alpha of a game that's also coming out in Early Access, I think it's totally okay.
The graphics are at least upper mid-range, sometimes scratching
at the lower edge of the top quality. Even though Pathea is just a small indie studio,
they do an excellent job here, reaching almost AAA standards. The models,
textures and animations are all of a high standard.
In the options menu we have numerous setting options to adapt
the look and the gameplay to our preferences and possibly weaker hardware. All
inputs are optimized for keyboard and mouse but also for gamepad and are completely customizable.
The soundtrack of the actions, the ambient noises and the music are good. Nothing that makes you
prick up your ears in extreme surprise, but I never had the feeling that sounds were missing.
However, voice output is not yet available, but I have already
seen a teaser video in which at least voice-over of the dialogues is prepared in English,
Chinese is also in the works, but German will probably only be available as subtitles.
The game contains a huge amount of text. Dialogues, item descriptions,
recipes, books, letters, there's
a lot to read. And these texts are available in a total of 10 languages.
In addition to German and English, Chinese is offered in two variants, French, Italian
and Spanish, as well as Russian, Thai and Japanese. The German and English
translations still had small rough edges, and there were also books or tooltips that weren't
even available yet. But that rarely happens and hasn't slowed down gameplay.
► Kickstarter, Early Access and State of the Game My Time at Sandrock was released as an Early Access
title on May 26th, 2022 for the PC on Steam and at Epic Games. Versions for Playstation and Xbox,
Nintendo Switch, IOS, Android and MacOS will most likely also be available again
. That was also the case with the predecessor, but the development is only
completed on the PC and then the other versions are implemented and published.
If I disregard the missing voice output, the game
doesn't really need the "Early Access" label at all. It is very stable, it is already
extremely extensive and I have not noticed any really serious gaps in content.
I'm assuming that they just have so many plans
to develop the game further. But here you don't have to worry
that you would invest in a construction site that is hardly playable. My Time at Sandrock
is already a complete and well playable game on the Early Access release date.
Incidentally, it was built with a Kickstarter campaign as basic funding. Almost 10k people have
already paid money at the start of the actual development,
and this has more or less
unlocked additional features for the future. In addition to more clothing,
more relationship NPCs or more character editor options, this list also includes such interesting things as a
multiplayer mode, robot armour, a racing game and more dungeons.
► My Time at Sandrock Test - opinion and conclusion I never played the predecessor
because I somehow thought it was more of a game for children. I really regret that now
. Because My Time at Sandrock was a lot of fun and really captivated me.
The story is suitable for children, which I even consider to be a great advantage. I'm
going to play this game with my nephew soon. So parents
don't have to be afraid, the game is absolutely suitable for families and the
predecessor was released in Germany from 6 years. When the multiplayer
is finished soon, this could be a real fun for family gaming sessions together.
Sandrock is enormously complex and sometimes there is still a lack of beginner's aids.
Sometimes story progress is a little too tied to crafting a specific
item. And then it can sometimes take longer without a chocolate bar.
Often there is an exact step-by-step guide for
the construction. But sometimes not, and then you first have to figure out
which machine can produce this object, what material you need, etc.
There could certainly be a nicer solution to that. Once you get the
gist of it, though, it becomes less annoying, but it could create minor blocking moments in the gameplay.
You only have a limited amount of energy available each day. I personally would have
liked to have had more of it. Often the energy was empty quickly, and then for the rest of the
day there was not much left to farm and mine resources. But at least
the game always offers some activities that you can do without energy. And otherwise
you can go to bed earlier, for which you even get a bonus the next day.
The scope of the crafting surprised me just as positively as the story,
the level of detail in the world and the variety of different game mechanics. There is
collecting and crafting, there are story-heavy parts, there are some social mechanics and
also real exploration tasks in caves and dungeons. And the friendships,
many skins and clothes, the expansion of your own house and
the many collectibles can probably keep you busy for months.
I don't really have anything else to complain about. The game is not
perfect, there are a few small corners in the inventory system, so far some tooltips,
book texts or dialogues are not 100% well translated, some are not included at all.
Not all of the game content that the developers have planned is in the game yet. And
the balancing can possibly also be expanded. But all in all, My Time at
Sandrock already offers a lot more game content and fun for the Early Access release
than many full-price AAA titles. My Time at Sandrock is a sandbox RPG diamond set in the desert sands.
After more than 25 hours of testing, I don't feel like I'll finish
the game anytime soon. So I'm
assuming a minimum of 40-50 hours of playtime here, and more with future expansions.
Is My Time at Sandrock better than My Time at Portia? It is a further development of the
well-known and popular system. In addition to a completely new story and new locations, it
also offers all sorts of gameplay improvements and completely new features are planned,
such as the multiplayer mode. In my opinion, fans of My Time at Portia
can't go wrong here, there's more of what you loved. It is the proven concept,
developed, expanded, provided with a new world and story and all sorts of new things.
► My Time at Sandrock Review - Rating For the price of €24.99 or $24.99,
My Time at Sandrock already offers an almost complete game for the early access release, which combines many
different elements from RPG, sandbox, survival and life sim games connected.
I would like to award a base rating of 90%
for the great concept, the extensive features and the story and world that is suitable for children but also
appealing to adults . Minor gaps in the translation result in a 3% deduction. This brings me
to a current final rating of 87% for the My Time at Sandrock Early Access Release Date.
Since Pathea still has a large amount of additional content planned
and the game is likely to receive some major updates in the coming months,
I reckon that this rating could rise to over 90%.
Do you like complex crafting systems and family-friendly games? Or is
Sandrock's graphics too cute for you and farming annoys you? Feel free to write me your
opinion in the comments or in the community discord at https://zapzockt.de/discord
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certainly can't hurt and then I wish you a great day, ciao ciao, your zap