TL:DR - The game's art, story and voice work is immaculate, but many of the gameplay elements like the inventory management, trading, leveling, combat, meta-progression, and endgame make the game a dull, boring and grueling experience. It just makes me wish they adapted the story as a comic or animated series, rather than as a game. I go more into detail as to why I don't like these mechanics if you want to know specifics.

I feel bad about not recommending this game, because there are a lot of things it does right. The voice work, art, animation, character design, music and storytelling are all phenomenal. There was a lot of care, time and dedication put into the game that needs to be appreciated. I even held off on writing a review until a completed the main story, just so I can say that I gave it a fair chance. But unfortunately, it feels like it's more style over substance at the moment.

Gameplay-wise it's very simplistic and easy to understand. It's essentially a strategy board game, where you travel the map and collect resources and complete objectives. I'll start with the things I do like about it first. Again, art and story is absolutely fantastic. Character classes are varied and diverse in play style, and upgrades add fun and unique variations to currently owned skills, so you can customize your team to your liking. The game has a a difficulty curve that gets easier as you progress, but makes the game challenging but rewarding. Unfortunately those are really the only highlights of the game. There are a lot of gameplay elements that make playing the game stale or repetitive. They may come off as nitpicks, but when you're playing this game for hours on end, they really start to dig into you.

Inventory management - Inventory management is super tedious in this game, and is largely limited by the weight limit. The weight limit is very small and can not be increased easily, requiring either a purchasable support animal (which you can only have one of) or by having a party member with a trait that increases it. You can also increase it with meta-currency, but this is flawed for a reason I'll get into later. Because inventory is so limited, most of the time you'll be staring at the screen wondering what you should get rid of. Finish combat, toss items. Step over an item space, toss items. It gets old quickly. And for some reason you'll get a "new item" notification *every* time you pick up an item—even when you already have additional quantities of that item in your inventory already. And why exactly is the inventory system like this? Because of the trading system.

Trading - Sandwalkers has no currency for obtaining items from NPCs in the traditional sense. Instead each item you collect has a set value, which you trade for items of equal value. Unfortunately, there's nothing really worthwhile to trade for. Items like equipment and fetishes provide small boosts or abilities that don't scale with level. Not to mention once a party member has a equipables that suit them best, there's no real need to swap them out. There are only a small number of equipable items and fetishes in the game, so you'll start seeing them over and over again very quickly. The only things you'll actively want to be carrying is rations, health potions, and resources to use on the map. Anything else is superfluous and adds to inventory clutter.

Leveling - Leveling up is cooler in concept than it is in execution. Each time you level up you can upgrade one of your abilities so either it does more damage/healing, or adds an additional effect to it, which is great. The problem starts after you reach level 8 onwards. At this point, the enemies' levels start scaling to match with your damage output. Which *completely* defeats the point of leveling, as even though your numbers are going up, your effectiveness in battle is not. You only can unlock a fixed number of abilities per character anyways, so even the upgrades get repetitive. Of course, there's a reason for that as well, and not a good one, which involves the meta-progression. Not to mention, even though you're leveling up, nothing else in the game does. Your equipable items and combat items maintain the same value for the entirety of the game, rendering them as essentially more inventory clutter. There's no point in throwing a grenade that does 10 damage when a basic attack can do a couple hundred. It makes leveling up more or less pointless after a certain threshold.

Combat - Combat in this game is fun, but only in the beginning when you don't know how the game or the classes work. Once you understand, it loses its luster and quickly becomes a chore. You'll see the same enemy types and formations over and over again. The game shifts from trying to strategically tackle each encounter to trying to end the battle in the least amount of turns possible so you can go back to playing the game. It doesn't help that enemies are everywhere, and there is an ambush mechanic which force triggers a battle after moving a certain amount of tiles. It would be a bit better if there was a Repel-like item to stop this bar from raising, but it'd only delay the problem, not solve it.

Meta-progression - It's not *bad* but the way they went about it was immensely frustrating. Originally, you would obtain meta-currency throughout the map by completing objectives and you could return to the starting point on the map to purchase permanent upgrades. For whatever reason, they changed it to where you can only purchase permanent upgrades by ending your run and starting a new one. Instead of purchasing upgrades that can benefit your current run, you're essentially told to throw it away, and potentially redo aspects of progress you've already completed just so you can benefit from the upgrades you purchased. That's a feature better suited for an idle game, than a game like this. It adds unnecessary breakpoints into the flow of the game that otherwise aren't needed. I ended up just beating the game without doing this, as I had made enough progress with the upgrades I purchased before this update that it wasn't really needed. It's kind of funny: the game's story likes to focus on the caravans and how their continued deaths are necessary sacrifices to save the world. In actuality, it's an unneeded mechanic designed to pad out game time.

Completion/Endgame - Something strange that happened about the progression of the game is that you're supposed to obtain 8 fragments to unlock the secret to the game's final area. However, I deliberately made a point to do all the side objectives first and by the time I got to the final area, I only had 4, so they game just... gave me the last four? It was very strange since obtaining the fragments had always been a more cinematic experience. Also I have yet to 100% the game because it requires me to kill 75 of each enemy type, and starting new runs to reach the unnecessary death total. I'm not sure if I can tough out the game long enough to get all the achievements.

All in all, Sandwalkers is not a bad game, but has a long way to go before it becomes a great game. It excels in its art and story direction, but the gameplay holds it back significantly. Which is a shame, because it really is a gorgeous game. While I think it's great the dev team is still working on updates and big fixes, the problems with the game need a legitimate rework on a fundamental level. I really hope this game improves meaningfully.

short sweet to the point fun to play love the setting most of all I paid full price for this