Once you upgrade your machines you can start to create work orders using queues. All of your various furnaces and refineries take time to do their thing, sometimes more than a day, so once you’ve set your workshop going and made sure there’s enough water and fuel to keep things ticking over, you can leave your machines unattended while you pop into town to do other things like take on side-quests, shop, mine and socialise. Moreover, the game has a lovely cadence and a rhythm to it that makes it difficult to stop playing. If a chemist put this formula up on a big projector at a Harvard lecture hall, everybody would clap. It’s formulaic, sure, but the formula is good. My Time At Sandrock brings all of these familiar features together in a neat and unified way, and for the most part carries everything off to a much higher standard than you’ll find anywhere else. Almost every idea you’ll find here – the farming, the mining, the dungeons, the interior decoration – has been seen somewhere else, or in the previous game My Time At Portia, for which this was originally intended as DLC. That dogged adherence to well-worn town simulator tropes is one of My Time At Sandrock’s few drawbacks. Anyway, I don’t have any better ideas, and I’m well on my way to having a baby with a hot sheriff, thanks. As far as representations of healthy relationships are concerned, “gifts-go-in, love-comes-out” is an odd one for every town simulator to have unanimously settled upon. You can bombard your crush with trinkets and compliments until they fall for you, and take them on dinner dates where you order their favourite food and pay for their meals. Wooing the locals is an unexpectedly involved process too, though My Time At Sandrock stumbles into every icky romance trope going. On Saturdays you can volunteer to rate and review items built by other workshops, which is effectively a 3D game of spot the difference as you rotate watering cans and cabinets in search of imperfections. Some features, like the ability to grow and maintain crops, keep animals and cook food, could be a game by themselves. It’s a relentlessly busy game if you try to take on too much. There’s just a whole lot going on all of the time in My Time At Sandrock. There are light RPG and combat elements, seeing you descend through dungeon levels to fight mutant lizards, level up your skills and discover rare loot and resources. You can mine a handful of different types of metal ore and collect machinery scraps from the desert, which can be smelted into more useful items and used as components in more elaborate machinery and advanced tools. Seasons pass, special events unfold, and residents appear convincingly human through the simple act of just wandering around as if they’ve got to be somewhere. The town ticks along in a fast-moving day-night cycle. Pretty much every feature and idea from every successful town simulator has come along for the ride. In My Time At Sandrock you play the folksy frontier town’s new builder, tasked with taking on various commissions to build machinery, tools and equipment for anyone who asks. My relationships with real humans fade into the background, to be replaced by an altogether more fulfilling kind of relationship, one based entirely on gifting the same jar of honey to a cartoon character over and over again until they admit that they love me. When fully in the grips of My Time At Sandrock, my little made-up computer game life is all I can think about. Very sorry to anybody who knows me in the real world, but I’m never happier than when I’m playing a town simulator. From: Steam, GOG, Humble, Epic Games Store.My Time At Sandrock takes every life sim feature under the sun and rolls them into a winning package.
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