My Time at Sandrock

My Time at Sandrock is an excellent life simulation game that improved on everything in My Time at Portia. It is bigger and better, and the recent updates have made it one I can recommend on Nintendo Switch as well. If you held off on it after hearing how rough things were at launch, you can now grab it. It isn’t as good as My Time at Sandrock on Steam Deck, but it is worth getting for handheld play now.

My Time at Sandrock is an RPG-style life/farming simulator. The game offers relaxing fun gameplay with a stunning post-apocalyptic setting, a very pleasant soundtrack, and an extensive ensemble of extremely well characterized extra characters.

If you don't mind a bit of idle time and trying to find something to do in between missions that may or may not mean days more of waiting for the right resources for your side task, the old-western bandits and those darn Geeglers really did keep my time at Sandrock interesting.

My Time at Sandrock is a building game where they took everything they learned in Portia and made it better, bigger and all mixed up here. Despite the technical limitations of the Switch version and some buildings taking too long to finish, the captivating story and characters are enough to keep you interested in it.

Overall, My Time at Sandrock is a decent game that could be great with some further polish. If it gets another patch, $39.99 is a fair price, as there’s lots to explore in this large, addictive game.

My Time at Sandrock is good fun. If you enjoyed My Time at Portia or similar games, then you’re very likely going to enjoy this one too — if you can look past the performance issues. Though its console release is a little behind the PC version, and there are some problems to smooth out, I still recommend it for fans of the genre. I really enjoyed the challenges of being a builder in a little town full of interesting characters, mishaps, sandstorms and mysteries.

There’s a lot I want to like about My Time at Sandrock, but outdated design and lacklustre visuals hold the game back—especially on the Switch.

It really is heartbreaking to see that My Time at Sandrock on the Switch is My Time at Portia all over again. There’s potential here. The setting and worldbuilding is fantastic, and it’s a large game with plenty to do. But this version just doesn’t feel ready yet. Perhaps in a few months or a year, it will be in a good place. For now, it’s better to wait before making the move.

My Time at Sandrock is a potentially delightful farming and crafting-based life simulator – but unfortunately, your time at Sandrock on Switch is a little half-baked for now, but has promise if updates can bring it up to speed.

My Time at Sandrock is a decent new entry in the farm sim genre, though not one that we’d say you need to play. To its credit, its mixture of open-ended farming, crafting, socializing, and questing is compelling and could easily drive dozens of hours of gameplay if it gets its hooks in you. However, everything My Time at Sandrock does has been done elsewhere, and better. Couple this with the mess of technical problems at launch, and you’ve got a game that has its draws but does very little to demonstrate that it’s worthy of your attention. If you’ve already started and finished several farms across the likes of Stardew Valley, Harvestella, and Story of Seasons, and are looking for something new — and you're not too bothered by bland presentation and technical hiccups — then My Time at Sandrock could be a decent way to keep working the land. That said, we’d recommend you wait for a deep sale, ideally several months from now once time proves whether those patches ever come.

My Time at Sandrock’s issues are due to its ambition and sheer density of what you can do. I would expect a Yakuza title to have similar issues on Switch. But then the developers aren’t putting Yakuza games on the console. I am quite sure that this game is a fine experience on other platforms. However, the developer decided to release it on Switch, and therefore this version needs to be assessed in isolation. In short, it is just not a good game on this specific platform, and the developers should have made a judgment call to pull this version when it was clear that it wasn’t going to work. That way we wouldn’t have been subjected to it.