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My Time at Sandrock Early Access Review

Game: My Time at Sandrock Early Access
Genre: Adventure, Casual, Indie, RPG, Simulation
System: Steam (Windows) (also available on the Epic Store)
Developers | Publishers: Pathea Games | Pathea Games & PM Studios
Controller Support: Full
Price: US $24.99  | UK £19.99 | EU € 20,99
Release Date: May 26th, 2022

Review code used, with many thanks to Stride PR.

My Time at Sandrock is an adventure simulation game from developers Pathea Games. Like us here at LadiesGamers, you may have played their previous game My Time in Portia, and if you did, you would feel right at home in Sandrock. Pathea Games ran a Kickstarter campaign in 2021, and 9,915 backers pledged $524,770 to bring My Time at Sandrock to life. Check out our hints and tips guide for My Time at Sandrock, which you can find here. 

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A Post-apocalyptic World

My Time at Sandrock is set in a post-apocalyptic world 300 years after the Day of Calamity destroyed most modern technologies. Sandrock is another member of the Alliance of Free Cities and an active trade partner with the city of Portia.

At the beginning of the game, you can customise your character with all the usual customising choices such as hair, eye colour and gender options of male and female.

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Customise your character

Hired Help

You arrive in town by train after accepting a job offer to be Sandrock’s newest builder and rebuild the community and town to its former glory. Your workshop is handed down to you from Mason, the town’s previous builder who is retiring. The first order of business is to build a new tool with wood and stone that allows you to harvest more resources.

You’ll be revamping the run-down workshop you are now the proud owner of. While you are doing that, you’ll be making friends with the locals, picking up rubbish around the town, doing quests and keeping up with events. The position of your workshop is handy as it’s stationed across the train tracks from the town, and you are near the construction building, which is helpful for material gathering.

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Desert Environment

Since Sandrock is in a desert environment, the town has a single water resource to supply the entire town, so everyone is pretty big on conserving water. Water is used to help run your crafting machines in your workshop. You’ll even harvest morning dew to retain your water sources.

Lack of water also makes a difference to the resources you collect in Sandrock. In Portia, you just chopped a tree as there was plenty of them, as it is set in a greener environment. However, in Sandrock, there aren’t as many trees, and what there are, you can’t cut since the town is threatened by desertification.

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Home sweet home!

So instead, there are all kinds of piles of debris lying around. You’ll be scratching around in piles of scrap and rubbish on the ground that you can scavenge for materials and parts by hand. You will find wood, rocks, and other items such as metal. Many of your resources come from that. Cleaning up trash in town can also give you scraps, some of which can actually be helpful.

Scrap and Recycle

By using the recycling station in your workshop, you can break down the resources you have collected into parts and materials. The crafting and production of items from the workshop with the help of various machines are pretty much the same as they were in Portia, with a few other additions. My Time at Sandrock has streamlined the crafting menus and the blueprint screen. It makes it easier to interact with the machines, read the recipes, and be more intuitive to use. This both speeds up crafting and makes the process of building new items fun and interesting.

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Talk to the locals

Take on Quests

Visiting the town, you’ll find the commission board in the Commerce Guild and take on quests from Sandrock citizens. The quests are mostly about making an item in your workshop and returning it to the quest giver. In doing so, your reputation level with the quest giver increases, and you earn some exp and a gift off Gols (money) in return for your trouble.

The all-important storage method for storing your items has had an upgrade. As usual, you can store items in chests, with each chest only storing so much. However, you can quickly swap to the other chests on your property once you’ve opened one without walking around. I like this upgrade, and it is sorely needed in a game where the storage of items is important.

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Collecting stone.

Chat to the Locals

Like My Time at Portia, Sandrock has plenty of NPCs to interact with, and some familiar faces return from the previous game. Sandrock’s townspeople are quite interesting, both in character and design. Unfortunately, there isn’t any voice acting to flesh the characters out a little. Pathea Games planned to add voice acting at some stage in the game, but I was disappointed it wasn’t included in the build I reviewed.

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Play games at the game centre

Between rearranging the furniture in your house and fulfilling quests for the locals, you can also explore the Hazardous Ruins. But be prepared with enough stamina and health items for the trip before you go. Of course, good weapons and equipment are also crucial, which you can make at the workshop.

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Increase your skills

Combat

The combat has been updated for My Time at Sandrock with new weapons and added defence break mechanics to use to your tactical advantage. Fighting in My Time at Portia always felt out of place to me, like it was tacked on to add to the game as an afterthought. Yet it still feels out of place even with the updated combat mechanics.

I’d rather potter about my garden and go mining than go off fighting. However, in saying that, one of the benefits of My Time at Sandrock is everything can be taken at your leisure (apart from some quests). There isn’t any major rush to do anything in the game.

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Sandy the guide

Visuals and Controls

Graphically the game is a vast improvement on Portia. It still has the same art style, but it’s a lot more polished than before. Those of us that played My Time at Portia on the Switch will remember the numerous crashes and glitches.

At the beginning, I had an initial hiccup at the start when I first tried to play the game, it wouldn’t load. Then when it did load, it took ages to get to the point I could play. The game has had a lot of updates since then, and I’m happy to report that it hasn’t happened since. While it does perform well, some lessons seem to have been learnt by the developers from Portia. During the expedition trips, there are performance drops where the frame rate drops significantly.

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Hunting for resources

Conclusion

My Time at Sandrock is a standalone game; you don’t have to have played Portia to be able to enjoy it. The game takes new characters to a new location and updates some mechanics for the better. However, if you have played the previous game, it will feel very familiar, like returning home to see an old friend.

Final Verdict: I Like It a Lot  I like it a lot

2 comments

  1. “Those of us that played My Time at Portia on the Switch will remember the numerous crashes and glitches.”
    I had maybe two crashes the entire time I played, which I think was close to 200 hours, on my Switch. I did not seem to have the same issues that others had.

    1. Hi thanks for reading, you must have been one of the lucky ones that didn’t have any crashes with My Time at Portia. Yvonne and I played the game from release and had many crashes and frame rate problems, though Sandrock doesn’t have as many.

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