Sandwalkers Steam Charts & Stats

The game is quite good, I enjoy the combat exploration, and the story is intriguing with a fantastic atmosphere. Random encounters are interesting and a fun surprise along the games journey. I like the ability for choice in main quest points allowing for an immersion into the world. I hope the game Devs expand on this with DLC or updates with more. The game is Not as hard as others make it seem in reviews, at 10hrs in i've had my first caravan not wipe at all! I have a level 10 character and have managed great. farming, safe travel routing, and picking up good upgrades for your level ups is key. The Pyromancer fire wall, combo with the starting parties combos minus the arbourist works amazing for multi and single target clearing. I Have managed at 10hrs to get 5 of the Fragments including the final one as the achievements suggest. My Recommendations to the Devs would be: more enemies variations and new attacks, less random encounters for fights when travelling or items to lower it so I can travel faster when heading to quest markers. More abilties and fetishes for the party to experiment with. I found in my 10hrs of playthrough I kept finding the same stuff in chests which made basically only stocking up on food important thus far (which I hope changes as I head westward as the main story continues). Additionally It is probably a bug but you can travel back and forth with the fast travel to all the main areas and get free loot. ie 20 cactus, some mushrooms, the fresh water, and never need to trade or farm for any food once you've unlocked a few flight pathways. Its kinda cheese tbh. overall great game, I plan to 100% and I hope to see more updates and bug fixes. Great Work team! Please keep adding more, and expanding the Upgrades and skills to choose from. :D

I like it overall. Recommend but with caveats. The style is great. The world setting is super interesting. The flavour and vibes are all super good. The gameplay loop is good in theory, but it needs a lot of work on rebalancing I think. Combat is either trivially easy or really hard. There's too much combat and mostly it's just a slogfest of the same few moves over and over again. I found that the overworld caravanning was kinda in need of some of the same rebalancing as well - there's a lot of stuff out there on the map and its really easy to load yourself down with resources that are theoretically valuable for trading but make it so you can't move, and you're either struggling for supplies or so rich in supplies that they feel trivial. Really good in theory, just needs some tweaks to get there

Man I would absolutely love to recommend this game. The world is awesome, I love the graphic style and exploring is initially very exciting. But it is such a slog where I just got to, the NE part of the map flying city area, encounters every 7 steps or less, super annoying combat. Have not used different abilities in so long. Economy is broken, its just about choosing what I want to carry with no real interesting choices to make other than the fetishes (items that give you new abilities) or party members. It needs diversity and meaning to combat, maybe a way to reduce encounters or skip easy ones so traveling is less annoying. I really want to finish the game but the lack of depth once you beat the first quest or two really prevents me from doing so. I have not given up on the game and will update the review if the developer improves it or if I do end up finishing it and find it worth the slog. But for now not recommended.

The game is good, and quite good on the steam deck, using track pad. If the game could be optimized for controller use I guess it would be perfect

I was looking forward to this and really wanted to love the game but I just can't recommend it in its current state. In its current state its a boring slog devoid of choices, I really hope they can turn it around. Technical performance, graphics, sound, narrative, etc were all fantastic. I only had one technical issue and it's that enemy sprites are often duplicated & stacked on top of each other, not a problem just visually jarring. There are four core problems with the game: First, the game plays like a JRPG masquerading as a rogue-lite. The rogue-lite meta-progression tree can be finished in 2-3 runs and once its finished it completely trivializes the food supply mechanic (which feels unfun and unfair otherwise). Choosing a new caravan is boring because you don't really get to choose them, you're presented with a list of 3 with random classes/traits. This might be interesting except there are very very few traits with most of them being completely negligible and a few being overpowered (Sly). Furthermore, you can tediously replace them anyways once you're in-game. It would be much more interesting to just choose your own and be able to build and try out different parties. Second, the balance of the game is absolutely terrible. 75% of the skills are completely useless and most classes/characters only have 1-2 good skills that you're going to spam in all situations. This is further cemented by being able to infinitely upgrade a chosen skill, further reducing any choice that could have resulted. The stats of characters is really poorly balanced, shields are much better than health but some characters have more HP/less shields just to make them different. Speed is king, fast characters are just strictly better than slow characters (mostly because of the shield break mechanic). Speed overall is a poor and uninteresting mechanic, there are better ways to do initiative systems. All of the buff skills are useless because you can't afford to waste time buffing, your characters are very squishy so you need to end a fight quickly or die (most of my playthroughs were 1-2 shotting enemies with an aoe skill before they could do anything). I don't know how they're going to solve this because on the flipside bosses hit so hard that they can kill your characters in 1-2 rounds. The recent patch tried to address some of these changes but I don't think it will help because they increased the frequency of the fights (which will make characters stronger via gaining xp). Rather, what they should have done is decreased the frequency of fights and made the fights harder individually. The problem though is theres so very little variance among the different types of skills that you aren't really making any choices or decisions mid-combat aside from 'use this characters strongest skill, again' so they're in a tough spot. A couple more examples of why the skill design is bad: there are several skills that move a character forward or backward but being forward or backward almost never matters or has any impact on the game-play, so its just a wasted skill. The tamer has a skill that gives them a +25% damage buff for two rounds but you could instead just attack immediately (for 100% damage). Several characters have skills that would be good on a character with a different speed value, for example Assassin has a skill that does bonus dmg to targets under half HP. I had an Assassin with this skill on my 5-hour winning run (roguelite runs should not last 5 hours) and never once proc'd this because its a terrible skill on a fast character. Similarly the Protector has a damage amp skill but its somewhat useless on a slow character because by the time he can get it out, the fight is over. Third, a lot of the game's 'content' or quests are just glorified fetch quests where you repeatedly run back and forth in a small area. This is anththetical to the game's desire to be a roguelite and just feels bad to do as you're food-taxed for moving tiles on the map. The entire game turns into just move from food tile to food tile, managing your inventory to store as much food as possibile while 1-shotting packs of enemies and praying a boss doesn't RNG you or doesn't have 75% resistance to the damage type of the characters the game randomly rolled for you. You are also *constantly* overweight, having to manage inventory every 1-3 steps. Lastly, the random events are boring and unimpactful. FTL was so good because its random events were learnable, impactful and carried risk. The events in Sandwalkers don't really **do** anything and you don't have much choice in how you do them. Any consequences you could suffer are randomly assigned to your characters, you can't choose which ones take on the risk (although there isn't any risk but there should be). This leads to every run and event being samey and after a while you're just spamming the ignore button. Some events should always be bad (and the player can learn this over multiple runs), some always good, some have risks, some should have manipulatable risks etc.

The core game play loop of this game becomes very stale very fast. You spend your time wandering from location to location, interacting with landmarks that give resources and occasional combat encounters. Both of these become a chore in no time. With resource management, your inventory space is very limited. This would be okay if it involved managing your inventory to prioritise important and valuable resources, but that is not the case here. It is unclear what the purpose of many of the items you pick up is, making prioritisation a guessing game. Merchants don't stock meaningful upgrades after the first couple of times you encounter them, making hoarding resources for trade pointless. Eventually inventory management devolves to deleting the new pieces of junk that you received from an interaction to get below the weight burden that prevents your caravan from moving another step until you do so. Combat too is very simplistic. There isn't much enemy variety, and the variety that you do encounter is spoilt by the fact that faction's packs have the same composition in every encounter. There are factors like resistances, shields, etc. that look like they can provide some depth, but combat soon devolves into simply picking the same abilities over and over to end the encounter as soon as possible. As mind numbing as the combat becomes, it is made even worse by a mechanic that forces an ambush encounter on you if you move too far during exploration without opting to trigger combat with a pack in the world. This makes travelling over longs distances tedious, since you not only have to stare at your caravan critter slowly moving between the locations, but also have to deal with these ambushes. The game's legacy mechanic also feel under cooked. There are no mechanics that limit the lifespan of your caravan other than having all of the members die, which can be easily avoided. I was able to unlock the 4th tablet (the resources that tracks progression in the game) on my first run, after which I decided to start a new run just to see if that would add some spice back into the game. It didn't. Hopefully future updates will improve the mechanics of the game to make playing it less of a slog.

The game has a great foundation but is currently bloated by pointless mechanics, optimization issues, lack of difficulty and game-breaking bugs. I'd love to recommend this game to other players but in it's current state it's not worth picking up. Pros: -Character designs look great. -Each class has a unique set of moves which you can pick/upgrade yourself. -Enjoyable story and easy to read dialogue. -Conceptually very unique. -Great soundtrack Cons: -The optimization honestly sucks. My rig (Ryzen 5700x3d & RTX 3080) shouldn't be struggling running this game on max settings, but it certainly does. Not only that, opening the map seems to be causing memory leaks and causes the game to freeze for a second every single time you move after opening up the map once. -Difficulty in this game doesn't exist, since you can breeze/brute-force your way through the story. 95%+ of all combat encounters end after the first round without you taking any damage, bosses take like 2/3 rounds and might be able to hit you once before falling the next turn. -Equipment system is rather pointless since every class has 1 specific piece that works well on them, and the stats they provide don't scale, which makes them pretty irrelevant after level 4/5. -Inventory limit is poorly executed because the only items you realistically want to carry are food/supply items and maybe a few potions/in-combat-use items just in case. -Trading "valuables" is an afterthought, since they don't really sell for much, all it does is clog up your limited inventory space. Speaking of trading, there isn't enough variety of items, every trader/market has a very limited amount of items which are almost the same as any other trader, the only items you want are supplies anyway. -The game being designed as a roguelite is dragging the game down, there's absolutely no reason to restart your runs because there's no variety, mainly because the game has a singular story which you can beat in your first playthrough. -The story doesn't take you through the entire map, and a big part of the main story is collecting 7 "fragments" which provide background information of what happened/caused the events in the story. Fragments 3-5 are somehow completely missable/skipable, since I've beaten the game by following the main story without receiving any (side)quests which point me towards the other fragments. -Multiple of the quests you encounter cannot be finished due to bugs, they also don't reset if you start a new run. If you can't finish a quest in one run, you'll never be able to complete them in later runs, because they stay in your quest log. Said bugs include: enemies you're supposed to slay/talk to not spawning at all or points of interests vanishing if a random encounter shows up the moment you step on that one tile. The game does have a lot of potential, but considering the game has officially fully released recently, I doubt the developers will add/change a handful of features in the game which are dragging the game down. I appreciate the devs doing a lot of bugfixing/micropatching quickly after launch and communicating on what they're still trying to fix, but the way the game functions right now isn't a game which I'd consider "ready" for a full release. I don't regret playing the game since I enjoyed my time with it, but it's hard to recommend to others because it still lacks a lot of polish.

I don't this will be for everyone. It reminds me of back when I frist played the original X-Com game. It's very unforgiving and you have to figure things out on your own with turn based RPG combat added. Otherwise the game pretty much tells you what to do. They give markers, directions to go etc. The rest is just RNG shinanigans lol Keep in mind, especially if you actually pay attention to the intro, story and tutorial, it SCREAMS survival so make sure to keep that in mind. You are going to starve. You are going to die. You will start another run similar to other rogue-like games. Try to unlock what you can so you have it to carry over to the next run(even this is included in the lore of the game; pay attention ya'll lol). I like it. It can definitely be frustrating when you have a good team, found nice trades for equipment and supplies then figuratively and/or literally run into a dry spell and that's the end of that caravan *plays tiny violin* Just dust yourself off and start your umpteenth new game plus so to speak and keep going. If you skip through the quest dialogue you are missing out; even the flavor text of items etc is there to help. I recommend this game for players with patience and especially if you have played games like the original XCOM. It's not mind blowing so far but it is a fun challenge to pass the time. :)

Great potential, poor mechanics Pros: + Great storyteling + Great worldbuilding + Nice graphics Cons: - Game is trivial, I'm on 2nd run and one-shot enemies every fight. Finishing game at this point is just running from point to point. - Random encounters are too easy, too frequent, just annoying. Enemies also come with same pack composition every time which means you fight same set of monster with same abilities and turn order over and over again. Damage is constant so you can redo same actions every time. - Character balance. Speed is king, charcters with 6+ speed will act first in all fight making them much better then all other. Also there is no exponential curve for leveling, meaning you stack levels on one character with aoe ability and high speed and just one-shot every opponent. - No enemies scaling. I know it has it pros and cons, but with current implementation, it results in you fighting underleveled opponents which is boring and annoying. Game has great potential and most of it is just there, it lacks mostly "number" fixes

This game has a remarkable atmosphere. The audiovisual style and the ambiance are on point and the oppressive desert mood oozes out of its ears. It looks, sounds and moves fantastically. Some aspects are not perfect (quite a few, actually), but I still enjoy the loop of exploration. Played the demo way back, found it very intriguing, bought the game when it hit early access to show my support. Played a run or two then, but waited for the full release to really dig my teeth into it since it had some jank and feature balancing to rectify. I usually review games when I'm finished with them or when I've played way more than a couple of hours, but I feel this game deserves the attention now that it's out of early access. It's a roguelike about caravans exploring a hostile and dying world trying to expand, survive and heal the surroundings. Maybe plant a tree and make it less sucky. The game is played in two ways; exploration and combat. Exploration takes place on a hex grid map - walking, managing inventory and supplies, talking to people in towns, trading with merchants, the whole shebang. Combat is a row-based JRPG-thingy that do feel surprisingly good to be honest. The animations can get a bit slow and are unskippable, but it looks great and the shield/break system is pretty interesting (a system we've seen before i JRPGs, sure, but it's still a good one). I've done a few shorter newbie runs that ended in complete disaster, as was expected. The harsh and unforgiving world is relentless at times. You will starve constantly, enemies will smack you around all over the place, party members die permanently, supplies/rations will dwindle and kill you slowly, and you have no idea where you're going most of the time. The main quest says to go east. That's it. The rest is up to you to explore. And that's the premise; explore, die, repeat. I find the gameplay loop to be quite satisfying since I'm a sucker for exploration and games with hefty atmospheres. Just don't head off too far too soon. You'll get ushered to kingdom come pretty quickly. There is persistent progression in this game, which is very welcome. No run is really a waste of time. You get permanent upgrades and starting bonuses now and again. Once you get a better grip on how the game works and what you might want to aim for you will make progress. Which is the whole point of a roguelike, to be fair. There is a hurdle of confusion and trial and error to overcome. My latest run went exceedingly well. And that's when the gameplay start to shine as well. The management, leveling up, choosing skills and party members, doing quests, trading, exploring, sweating whilst counting supplies. All before retreating to a town to recoup a bit. Or try to. Worth checking out if the premise interests you. Some people seem to find the confusing and mysterious world to be a bad thing, but I feel the complete opposite. It really premieres exploration and figuring out what the heck you're supposed to do. It fits the vibe. There are aspects that are in need of balancing but it's still engaging enough for my recommendation. They're still working on the game, and it's much more stable and functional now when it's out of early access. Let's hope they don't abandon it completely now that it went out of early access. I kind of suspect that they will since they probably want to move on to new things. Let's hope they at least fix spelling mistakes (I've seen a few) and some technical issues some folks have been having. Polish it up a bit. I think they're in a good spot.