The #1 issue with this game is bloat. According to the devs, the story is 3.29 times longer than My Time at Portia – already a pretty long game, mind you. I know “more game” is supposed to be good, but Sandrock overstays its welcome and makes you wonder when it finally ends. Imagine watching a movie, and after an epic showdown with the main villain, when you’re ready for the credits to roll - another movie begins instead. It means you need many hours of your life to complete the story in one sitting and not lose track of it. There are more than twice side quests than Portia, too - and most of them are on a timer. I ended up so overwhelmed by quests that I began refusing them at some point, which in turn led to a frustrating feeling of missing out on content. There is more of everything else as well. There are hundreds of items - scrap alone comes in like 15 varieties - making inventory management an ever-present annoying part of the gameplay.

If a developer from Pathea is reading this - I would like you to grab a sheet of paper, write “Less is More” on it, then hang it somewhere in the office where everyone can see it every day. I have no need for 20 romantic interests in the game, if the majority of them will lack character, quests, unique items, voice acting... Give me just 3 but make them really fleshed out and rich with content. Case in point: Nia - she got so much backstory, relevance to the plot, unique events and ties to the main character that she makes every other romance look like an unnecessary waste of development resources.


Sandrock is a heavily narrative-driven game. For 100-150 hours you will be listening to dialogue with multiple people, constantly referencing your character. For some reason, even though your character is not a “blank slate” and has a backstory, parents, childhood friend etc. you are free to name him/her whatever you want. This creates a huge problem for voice actors. You see, expecting them to voice dozens of custom names like Codsworth or Vasco would be unrealistic, so they only had two options - either skip the player character’s name entirely, or to use generic “the Builder”. As a result, dialogue constantly loses meaning and feels jarring. For example, “Me, Harris and you will go to the cave” turns into “Me and you will go to the cave”; “S.S. Harris” (ship name) turns into “S.S.” (???), and even though you can be a best friend to people and marry them, they will still refer to you as “the Builder” (even if there are other builders present in the same scene).

What exacerbates this issue is the silent protagonist. Which on its own perhaps wouldn’t be that bad - if Mi-an didn’t exist. Mi-an is also a Builder, and so in most scenes she effectively speaks for both of you and ends up praised for things you did. All leading to a feeling of the player character being a sidekick to Mi-an. While I realize voicing the whole 250.000 words main story is unrealistic, this just leads back to my point - why did they write a huge story like that?


Sandrock feels awfully derivative - it just grabs about every single gameplay element and design decision from Portia and carefully copy/pastes them into a new game. The only meaningful difference here is the new desert setting, and frankly - it’s terrible and doesn’t work for a game like this. You will struggle to tell the seasons apart - it’s always just sand, with the (very) subtle coat of white in Winter and green in Spring. Outside of an occasional sandstorm the weather is also static for the most part – you will not see any snow and I only witnessed rain 1 (one!) time after 100+ hours into the game. Of course, there are setting-based complications: like you need water (rare and expensive) to cool your machines; sand accumulates on them over time so you need to clean it; you are not allowed to chop trees near the city etc. However, ultimately all of it feels like busywork, aimed at making your early game more painful and tedious than it needs to be.

Narratively, it’s just a mix of every Wild West cliché. Your will hear “Howdy!” from about every character, even the newcomers. There are sheriffs, bandits, cowb... I mean, Yakboys. Which I could probably live with, but the huge appeal of a My Time game is to be able to improve your community and see a meaningful impact of your actions over time. I still remember building a fast travel system in Portia and how much of an achievement it felt. Here the main theme is greenification of the desert however, which essentially makes you feel like a sidekick to botanist characters and a glorified gardener, as the Builder stuff takes a backstage to planting trees. Furthermore, the first half of the exceedingly long story just has you doing barely meaningful stuff, with the common theme being “bandits broke our bench/water tower/farm/statue - please repair it!”. Yes, there are guns now - but they feel like a gimmick, requiring entering an “aiming” mode, and are so ammo-hungry that using them is just not sustainable, unless you enjoy grinding mines to make more bullets. You do get the ability to join Civil Corps as a Deputy this time round, but ultimately this only serves to further distract you into becoming a “jack of all trades”.


Sandrock tries to be more of an RPG, with everything from your chair to your horse coming in multiple tiers of quality. You can also “refine” an item to increase its level and quality by throwing rare gems you first have to grind at it. At first I thought this to be a very cool system, as I imagined it would be possible to upgrade any piece of clothing indefinitely and make it competitive in the late game - but you’re only able to upgrade anything up to 10 levels above its “required level”, making the system pointless. Furthermore, this system only made matters worse as for the first half of the game I had to actively avoid the “blue” quality commissions - because I simply did not have the required gems at the time to make such quality items.

Also, while there are levels and skill points – you will easily unlock everything provided you play long enough, so there are no builds or anything like that. The perks are subtle buffs rather than something that has great impact over the gameplay. As such, the main form of progression comes in the form of gear - and is fully tied to the main story, which unlocks more areas and resources. While you unlock Bronze and Iron relatively early on and at a steady pace, it is unfortunately followed by a very long and stale midgame where you don’t unlock anything until late game, where you get Chromium and Aluminum almost back to back.


Sandrock is filled to the brim with memes and popular culture references, and every quest title is an attempt at a witty pun. It all looks quaint and fun at first, but quickly grows exhausting, especially as the writers make NPC go more and more out of character just to throw in another “Mic drop!”. The writing feels too concerned with the “current day” agenda for a game that’s supposed to take place in a post apocalyptic setting. For example, a woman I offered my help said she does not accept “free help” from strangers, and almost reported me for sexual harassment. And after that a homosexual man made advances on my male character without my consent, or ever speaking to that particular character to begin with. Some characters are so obnoxious I found it really hard to co-exist with them in the same game.


My time at Sandrock was almost 200 hours full of adventure and emotions. Just like Portia, this game has quite a few enjoyable things. Pretty graphics, some quality of life additions, even the optimization is finally half-decent! Unfortunately, all the diamonds are buried deeply under the sand of a game that is too ambitious for its own good.