My Time At Sandrock PC Review
Summary: Take a break from alien invasions and warfare and help rebuild a post-apocalyptic town.
4.4
Mindful Maker
I never played My Time At Portia but it looked interesting… so an opportunity to have a go at My Time At Sandrock seemed like the next best thing… or some might say a better thing.
From what I understand My Time At Sandrock takes the elements of the first game, expands upon them and improves them.
Visually the game stands out as a lovely bright cartoonish world with some pretty over the top characters. Before you get into the game you get to create your own character to help make the whole experience a bit more personal (and as this is a builder/life sim it’s nice to be able to play as yourself if you want to). Things start simply enough… you are informed you are the new maker in the town as the previous one is moving on. You get to take over the previous builders workshop… which seems remarkably under equipped considering all the tasks that you end up being asked to complete. This is where one of the core game elements comes in… make tools to complete commissions that lead to the ability to make better tools that lead to bigger commissions etc etc etc.
There are some tasks that have time constraints (and time does seem to disappear quite quickly while you are keeping busy)… but many are more or less at your own pace. Which is just as well because in addition to completing commissions… there are a number of extra activities you can engage in from romancing one of the townfolk to playing games in a fun house or helping restock the museum to mention a few. It can take a while to get yourself set up and it can feel a bit overwhelming if you are trying to complete one commission and another one or few come in and suddenly you have to prioritise one over all others but that might mean the tool/machine you were in the middle of building is not needed till later and you have to gather different resources… but you get the hang of it after a while.
It’s all pretty easy going and even though there is some combat… it doesn’t feel overly threatening or dangerous. People are pretty one dimensional but there are enough of them to give some variety to interactions and worst case scenario you can just keep yourself busy with building.
I did find the loading times could be a bit lengthy and when I first started the game it presented me with what could be called a passive aggressive note… I was informed that I might experience slow loading and was advised to either upgrade to an SSD or to de-fragment my hard drive. Now… I do have SSD drives but I believe they were full when I installed My Time At Sandrock so it did indeed get installed on a standard drive… however, implying that my drive is fragmented was pretty harsh as I’m running Windows 11 and it automatically checks and de-fragments on a regular basis (which was confirmed when I checked after receiving the message). The cynic in me suspects that the game might not be as optimised as it could be and the developers wanted to dismiss that as hardware issues… but perhaps it is simply co-incidence…. still seems a bit rude to start by telling the user their system is the fault for any speed issues (which I don’t notice in other games).
But… if you are looking for a reasonably easy going, not overly violent (hey there are chickens that fire rockets at you… it’s not totally peaceful), life/building sim, then My Time At Sandrock is a decent option… you can certainly sink a number of hours into it if you get into it.
About the Author
Chris O'Connor Father of four, husband of one and all round oddity. Gaming at home since about 1982 with a Sinclair ZX Spectrum. Moving on to the more traditional PC genre in the years that followed with the classic Jump Joe and Alley Cat. CGA, EGA, VGA and beyond PC's have been central to my gaming but I've also enjoyed consoles and hand helds along the way (who remembers the Atari Lynx?). Would have been actor/film maker, jack of many trades master of none.
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