My love for farming sims is long documented on this site, which is why I was excited to try My Time at Sandrock. I missed out on My Time at Portia even though I had heard it was a mostly decent game, and screenshots made this look like Story of Seasons with a gun—no seriously, you get guns in this.
However, playing My Time at Sandrock ran in stark contrast to my expectations—most of which I attribute largely to the Nintendo Switch. It’s honestly becoming baffling to me that after the success of games like Stardew Valley and even a lot of the more recent Story of Seasons, people would have a solid blueprint of do’s and don’ts for farming sims.
My Time at Sandrock’s story is simple. Having not played its predecessor, I was unaware that it was a post-apocalypse farming sim, which is a pretty neat idea. You take on the role of a fledgling builder who arrives at the western-inspired town of Sandrock—complete with actual cowboys—tasked with turning the desert wasteland into a thriving community. Over the course of the game, you’ll make friends, fall in love and maybe appease the ghost of your dead grandfather—that last one is a joke.
It’s as standard as farming sim stories go, but what really sets it apart for me is its setting and theming. I love the idea of this kind of game set on the harsh frontier, where the very nature of your environment puts you at odds with the nature of gameplay. I was actually endeared when early on when I chopped down my first cactus for potential wooded resources and one of the townspeople came over to yell at me since this is the desert and this kind of flora is sparse—it made a lot of sense.
Given the litany of things you’re usually expected to do during the day, it never feels like you have enough time, especially given how big both the main town and the world itself are.
However, it was My Time at Sandrock’s gameplay and presentation that started to turn me off a bit. The more I think about it, there’s really not one BIG thing that bothers me about the game—it’s a mostly standard affair as far as farming sims go—but it’s all the little ways in with Sandrock ignores innovation, and partakes in the worst elements of the genre. For starters, the clock is WAY too fast.
I feel the best examples in the genre usually ratio the clock at one real-life second to one in-game minute. However, this game’s clock blasts forward, rationing at three to four in-game minutes per one real-life second. Given the litany of things you’re usually expected to do during the day, it never feels like you have enough time, especially given how big both the main town and the world itself are.
Also, a particular bug-bear of mine with these kinds of games is their commitment to “makers.” I’m not against the idea of needing specific machines to make specialty items—having a forge to smelt iron bars and whatnot—but recently I’ve become pretty fed up with needing to populate my farm space with hundreds of forges, recyclers, and lumber mills because developers still haven’t figured out a convenient way to streamline this process.
This goes double for how pathetic inventory space is, and while Sandrock lets you just purchase inventory slots straight from the menu, it still wants you to fill your home and workshop with 1000 storage boxes to manage all your stuff, and in a post-Faefarm world, this is just unacceptable.
What’s even more infuriating about this—to which My Time at Sandrock participates in—is just how brutally long it takes for makers to produce anything. Considering a considerable part of gameplay is crafting items it is inconceivably boring to have to wait around for something to tell you when you’re allowed to progress in your task. And without certain fuel items that can speed up the process—not by much mind you—you’re left to just putter around and fill time in a way that detracts from the vibe of the experience.
“I can only hope that My Time at Sandrock becomes a playable experience because during my time reviewing it, it absolutely was not…”
Also, My Time at Sandrock doesn’t make stores with any personality or charm, instead just relegating shops to little cash registers that sit outside. You can argue this is done for player convenience, but it makes the whole town—which is the central hub of the whole game and a place you’re meant to feel a part of—lack any kind of personality. It also creates a weird disconnect since you don’t really know where to sell a lot of the stuff you find out in the world—it seems like no one wants to buy any of the scraps as far as I can tell—making revenue earning a lot more tedious than it needs to be. Would it have been so hard to have a simple shipping box?
Now we come to my biggest problem, and why this review leans mostly negative. I will preface it by saying what I’m about to say is largely a problem with the Nintendo Switch version, and the developers are apparently going to patch it after launch. Performance, both visual and gameplay, in this game is ABYSMAL. The game runs almost constantly at 15 frames per second, both objects and textures are constantly popping in, and the game can’t even render objects only a few pixel inches away from the player.
Furthermore, there’s a certain degree of sloppiness to the visuals as well, as certain textures just look flat, and things like cave entrances just look like featureless painted walls. This lack of visual fidelity also makes a lot of the character models—that already lack a certain degree of originality and look like stock Unity assets—look incredibly uncanny. The entire game lacks so much polish considering how little is actually being realized. I’ve said it a thousand times: the Switch can run Breath of the Wild mostly well, so there’s no reason something smaller and more focused shouldn’t be functional, especially for critical review.
I can only hope that My Time at Sandrock becomes a playable experience because during my time reviewing it, it absolutely was not and every time I booted it up it only took a few seconds before it wanted to shut it off. There’s a lot I want to like about it, and if it ran smoothly I might even be able to overlook some of the minor annoyances. But unless Pathea REALLY fixes the performance issues, especially on Switch, I don’t think I’d go back to it over the litany of better farming sims on the platform.
