New Chinese RTS-ARPG On Mobile

Playing Sands of Salazar is definitely a refreshing take on RPG real time strategy games. Let's talk about what is Sand of Salazar Sands of Salzaar is a 2021 fantasy strategy action role-playing game for Microsoft Windows, developed by Chinese indie video game company Han-Squirrel Studio, and published by Hong Kong company XD. In the game, the player controls a customized character to battle, recruit troops, manage a fief, and explore dungeons.

From first glance you can see some direct comparisons Mount and Blade but instead of first person melee combat, Sands Of Salzaar takes the Action RPG route and during combat scenarios you play as your class you chose at the beginning of the game and enter in combat mode and take on set amount of enemies due to what level you do. My playthrough I chose to play as the knight, which is a swordsman that is very infamous throughout the lands and can drastically make your playthrough much harder. As every class has some perk to them.

The Knight class will get attacked by almost everyone in cities so he must lay low when entering cities or just in your travels. Like I said earlier,  Sands of Salzaar is very similar to Mount and Blade, as you traverse the overworld you can visit or attack cities, attack bandits and much more. While following a lengthy storyline consist of 34 hours, There's a story to follow, but the game encourages you to take your own path. As you adventure around the world, you'll encounter traders, factions, bandits, and more. You can join factions and rank up to improve your reputation and receive rewards. This is clearly the focus of the game, so if the story doesn't grab you, don't worry; there's plenty of in-depth content to enjoy.

The gameplay is quite repetitive as during my first initial time playing a lot stuff got old fast and you'll realize that this is essentially the entire game plus a lot of RPG dialogue requiring you to choose how you want to handle certain situations. My biggest con I have to say is the Chinese default. So I was able to play in English but somehow clicking something in the mobile settings bugs the game out and turns it into Chinese and there's no way to change it back. Yes, granted Steam users ran into same problem but there's a fix for it on steam and now the same issue is now occurring. Other than that Sands of Salzaar is a RTS-ARPG that finally got a mobile port. Some of the UI elements on Android are a little wonky, the graphics are hand drawn and the world is basically the desert and my device which is the Pixel 7, is still able to get a beautiful 60FPS throughout my playthrough. However, during my playthrough, I encountered a crash whenever starting the story mode. 

After reloading the game, it prompted me to skip the opening cutscene, which prevented another crash. This was quite frustrating as I missed out on most of the context of the story, but I did not encounter another crash afterwards. So not only did I run into the Chinese default I also ran into the cutscene crashing the game which made me have to play the game with no context as this game is very rich in its story that its portraying.