Review of EraStorm - Episode 1: SandStorm
| Subject | EraStorm - Episode 1: SandStorm |
| By | Helpfulness: 0 Vote: 7publicnuisance on 2022-08-19 |
| Review | One thing I liked about Sandstorm was the romance options. Usually with these games I find one person out of the bunch that I actually would be interested in and just zero in on them but here I actually went through additional play throughs just to see how the various relationships panned out. While I liked the characters themselves and could find a path for each that I enjoyed there were some things I took issue with. I will say that the Nora route felt a little pigeon holed as if you try anything other than a straight romance route with her your options get real slim real fast. Compare that with Maddie or Rion who both have the option for a lust based route that seems more fleshed out. Another minor nitpick is that the game has options for you to do evil things but didn’t seem to really have an evil route you could take where you didn’t die. There are also a few “logic gaps”, basically little events that didn’t make sense based on things we knew. For instance during one of my epilogues it was mentioned that two characters had children together but the last time I heard them mentioned one had abandoned the other to armed gunmen while running away so I was skeptical of that. Another small logic gap was I got a lewd scene with one character who I had zero affinity for; had no lust points and no romance points for. It just seemed out of nowhere. The music was absolutely fantastic, especially when combined with certain cinematics the game has. Speaking of those, the game has cinematics at times, like cut scenes. This is one of the only times I can think of a visual novel having them and they were very well done. The models were pretty good as was the object detail. The lewd scenes were decent but felt a little light on choices and animations compared to some other games in the genre. There were sound effects during lewd scenes but I found the volume very low on them even when the volume options were cranked. I played Sandstorm on Linux. It never crashed. I did notice several issues with the English translation. There were a lot of little things such as wrong tense of words used; weird sentence structures that didn’t feel natural; and a few actual spelling mistakes. Overall I counted fourteen such issues combined. There was also one issue where after shaving his beard Julian’s portrait on screen still had the beard but was fixed for all the rest after. I also wish you could close the stats screen easier as once open you can’t close it without advancing the dialogue. You could manually save whenever you wanted and there were fifty four save slots. Graphics Engine: Ren’Py 7.3.5.606 Graphics API: OpenGL Disk Space Used: 3.5 GB Game Version Played: 1.0 GPU Usage: 0-87 % VRAM Usage: 462-765 MB CPU Usage: 2-25 % RAM Usage: 1.7-2.6 GB While I did have some nitpicks with the game it didn’t stop me from enjoying it. The overall story and characters were enjoyable and it is easily a solid game worth your time and money. I paid $2.65 CAD for it and finished my first play through in four hours and twenty nine minutes. My Score: 7/10 My System: AMD FX-9590 | 16GB DDR3-2133 | XFX RX 590 8GB Fat Boy | Mesa 22.1.4 | Samsung 870 QVO 1TB | Manjaro 21.3.6 | Mate 1.26.0 | Kernel 5.18.14-1-MANJARO |
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