If you are new to the franchise and have never played any of the games the premise is a simplistic one, yet a very addictive one. It takes the twist on a normal farming style game and spices it up. Instead you play as a builder and will take on commissions to help your fellow residents and community grow and thrive.

My Time In Sandrock offers the player a new location to start with, when you have arrived in the sandy desert town of Sandrock. A desert town that has seen better days and needs your help to use your expertise to build. With this being the main focus of the game you will find yourself pretty busy building everything from copper pipes to grand machines. You take the game at your own pace but you will find yourself helping anyone and everyone who asks. The town seems to be bustling with the NPC’s running around, doing their own work, even having little festivals with its day and night cycle. My Time At Sandrock has this way of dragging you away from the real world and into this virtual folk town.

To build your machines or tools you will need valuable resources that come in many forms of ores or scraps that you will then use to help build your commission.  At the start you will wander around the vast open desert area behind your workshop looking for stones to break to get you started in the easier commission, until you build up enough resources to make better tools before you can explore one of the various ruins the game has to offer.

When it comes to the people in Sandrock if you have played My Time At Portia, you can sense the same type of people, albeit a different look but I noticed a few of them felt very familiar in their personality not all but some. That isn’t a bad thing though because thankfully it does work and you can come to love these cast of characters.

Many of the characters have their own side quests for you to do and help them outside of the commissions, With the games light-hearted humour it is greatly appreciated, when you can attach yourself to some of the characters.You also can get different levels of friendship and fourteen different love interests, so you can chat, take on dates or even spar in a friendly duel. While keeping in mind the game is still early access, a lot of the narrative with daily interactions is repeated and personally I would have liked a deeper connection with some of the characters. I still have high hopes because if My Time At Portia is anything to go by then we are in for a treat.

There is lots of work to do in Sandrock and trying to balance everything if you take too much on or are not prepared it can feel daunting, So play at your own pace most of the game you have no time limit, although there are a few exceptions and only side quest/commission related, so you are free to progress in the story whenever you like.

You definitely will not be bored if you play this game, it has so much to offer aside from building and socializing. You can also farm, look after animals, cook, play mini-games and so much more. All these are usually games on their own but Pathea has become good at making the My Time At franchise just work and feel cohesive. During my whole play through I never felt that any of the features were out of place, and felt like they truly belonged.

The only downfall when it comes to the game is the things you expect in an early access game including the narrative, which at the time of writing does give you a very good sense of the direction the story is going but we definitely need to see it expanding. The roadmap of the game has the direction of the game looking like it will expand on a lot more the characters which we can not wait to try. Lastly the optimization is a bit poor at times but as we all know it is to be expected so be wary of this when going in, but the developers are actually doing a good job fixing the bugs and there have already been so many patches to fix stuff with loads more to come.