Sandwalkers
Last updated: 2025-04-10
- Appealing graphics and immersive world-building.
- Engaging gameplay loop with progression.
- Deep and versatile combat system.
- Numerous bugs and glitches hinder experience.
- Unbalanced difficulty creates inconsistent challenge.
- Lacks content and overall depth.
Verdict
Mixed
Summary
Positive 63% · Negative 37%. Score: 37 / 100
Positives:
- The game features appealing graphics, a distinct art style, and well-done animations, contributing to an immersive and visually pleasing experience. Many reviewers specifically praised the game's pixel art style. The game's world-building and lore are also frequently commended.
- Reviewers highlight the engaging gameplay loop involving exploration, resource management, and strategic decision-making. The game rewards persistence, allowing players to learn from failures and improve future runs. The roguelite elements contribute to a sense of accomplishment as players progress and unlock new content.
- The combat system is praised for its depth, versatility, and strategic elements. Reviewers appreciate the variety of status effects, damage types, and enemy types, which encourage experimentation and tactical thinking. The combat is easy to understand initially, but offers increasing depth as the game progresses.
- The game features a satisfying progression system with unlockable items and permanent upgrades that carry over to new runs. The developers are actively involved, releasing patches to improve balance, fix bugs, and add new content. This ongoing support enhances the overall player experience.
- The game features a diverse cast of characters, each with their own strengths, weaknesses, and unique skills. Experimenting with different character combinations and synergies is a key part of the gameplay experience. Some reviewers recommend specific classes for their effectiveness in combat and support.
Negatives:
- The game is plagued by numerous bugs, glitches, and technical issues. These range from minor text errors and UI problems to game-breaking bugs that prevent progression or cause crashes. Many reviewers mention that the game feels unpolished, even for an early access title.
- The game suffers from inconsistent and unbalanced difficulty. Players report both trivial encounters and insurmountable challenges, sometimes in quick succession. This is due to factors like poor enemy scaling, reliance on RNG, and unclear information about enemy strength, leading to frustration and the need for grinding.
- The game lacks sufficient content and depth, leading to a repetitive and unfulfilling experience. Players desire more enemy variety, quests, items, and meaningful choices. The core gameplay loop feels too simple, and there is little incentive to continue playing after completing the game once.
- Long and frequent loading times disrupt the game's flow and immersion. Loading screens become progressively worse as the game progresses, with some players reporting significant delays before and after each battle. This issue is exacerbated by the repetitive nature of combat and exploration.
- Resource management, particularly food, is a major pain point. Players frequently run out of supplies, leading to starvation and death, especially in the early game. The scarcity of resources, combined with limited carrying capacity and punishing mechanics, makes exploration frustrating and often forces frequent restarts.
Gameplay:
- The game features turn-based combat, roguelike elements, and meta-progression. Players explore, fight, and manage resources, with progress carrying over between runs via permanent upgrades. The game is challenging, expecting frequent caravan deaths as players learn and adapt.
- Exploration involves traversing a hex-grid map, managing limited resources like food, and interacting with NPCs. Food is consumed with each move, and scarcity makes route planning crucial. Static map layouts and limited resource respawns add to the challenge.
- Players manage a caravan of four characters in a post-apocalyptic setting, undertaking quests and trading. Caravan members can die permanently, requiring recruitment of replacements. The game emphasizes planning and adapting to losses.
- Food, healing, shields, and debuffs are crucial for survival. Balancing factors like food, health, weight, and trade is essential for success. Some character combinations, like Bard + Archaeologist, are highly effective.
- Characters possess unique abilities that aid in exploration and combat. Team composition is important, with each member's skills influencing the expedition. Players can recruit new characters with unique skills and attributes.
Performance:
- The game suffers from significant performance issues, including lag, stutters, freezes, long loading times, memory leaks, and occasional crashes. These issues become more pronounced during extended play sessions, requiring players to restart the game periodically. Some of these issues were present during early access but persist despite updates.
- These points are of low importance. One point mentions low technical requirements, another mentions the game causing the computer to run loudly, and the last mentions a price reduction. These points are either subjective or not directly related to the core gameplay experience.
- A specific questline involving healing lizard enemies can softlock the game due to an enemy AI bug. This prevents players from progressing further in the quest.
- Resource tiles sometimes appear but provide no resources when interacted with. This bug can impede player progress and resource gathering.
- A minor graphical bug causes corpses to remain standing after battle. This is a purely cosmetic issue and does not affect gameplay.
Recommendations:
- Many reviewers recommend waiting for bug fixes, performance improvements, and more content before purchasing. The game is often described as having potential, but is currently held back by technical issues and a lack of polish. Some reviewers plan to revisit the game after updates.
- Some reviewers express overall positive sentiments, describing the game as amazing, engaging, and good overall. They highlight the game's potential and express excitement for its future. The game's core goal is also appealing.
- Some reviewers suggest waiting for a sale or a significant discount before purchasing the game. This recommendation is often tied to the game's current state and the expectation of future improvements. This is a more nuanced take than a simple recommendation to wait.
- The game is recommended for players who enjoy challenging, tactical, roguelike experiences. Some reviewers compare it to games like XCOM, Darkest Dungeon, Legend of Keepers, Vagrus, or Curious Expedition. It may not appeal to casual players.
- These points are jokes or cultural references and do not provide constructive feedback. They are therefore given a very low importance score.
Miscellaneous:
- The game is in Early Access, with a roadmap for future updates including Chapter 2 in Autumn 2024. Some reviewers feel Early Access games should be held to a higher standard than betas, given that players are paying for them, and are excited to see how the game develops.
- The game features a unique and charming art style, with beautiful pixel art graphics, intriguing world-building, and character designs reminiscent of European and American styles. The tone is dark but not excessively violent.
- Flavor text and quest dialogue provide helpful information, and the game improves significantly after unlocking items, equipment, and idols for combat. However, some instructions are unclear.
- The game revolves around caravans exploring a hostile world with a large map including underground areas and crypts, focused on expansion, survival, and healing the environment.
- The character background stories are well-written, presented in a fragmented narrative style, adding depth to the game's lore and characters.
