It's probably more trouble than it's worth to sidestep around comparisons to Mount & Blade with Sands Of Salzaar. It's mostly the structure. Sands Of Salzaar drops you into a world of dynamically warring factions. You can join or compete with them by founding your own, or ignore them to beat up roving bandits, clear out combined dungeon/random encounter sites, and do odd jobs for named NPCs. Some of those figures are powerful, unkillable, and recruitable, although you may have to win them over with favours or gifts. You'll likely do a bit of everything, but mostly you'll be smashing armies into each other in 2D skirmishes.

It's no clone, though. While its component parts are familiar, Salzaar does enough of its own thing to win my affection, and its odd but sincere personality shines despite some muddy edges.

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Good things, they say, come to those who wait. Like clichés in the first sentence of an article, this is often a load of toss, but a stopped clock is (“That’s enough of that, thanks.” – Ed)>.

Sands Of Salzaar leapt into Early Access this January, its huge success in China prompting promises of an English translation soon. But 2020 did a lot of things to the word “soon”, so we’ll forgive them for delaying that translation. Besides, it was worth the wait. Sands is a superb game that blends the hack and slash chaos of Dynasty Warriors with the open world RPG skirmishes of Mount & Blade.

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Desert-roaming action-RPG Sands Of Salzaar has made a splash among Chinese players since its launch into Steam Early Access last week. It’s an interesting hybrid of Dynasty Warriors mobicide and a free-roaming light strategy RPG.

Its success has prompted the developers to declare an English translation “one of our top priorities, and we aim to add it to the game ASAP”. I’ve stumbled through it for a while like a monoglot oaf and have some thoughts.

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