Sandfall

The Sandfall demo offers remarkable presentation and atmosphere, that is a step above and beyond the grand majority of its RPG Maker peers.

The rich desert western motif is a very unique and fresh route to take. The world, with its use of color, interface, cut scene direction, background noise music and graphics, portray a very consistent engrossing world. Few RM games manage this level of atmosphere short of a handful of survival horror titles.

The story did not quite have a chance to get going in the duration of the short demo, but is already showing promise. The protagonist is troubled and intriguing without being a angst-riddled amnesiac. I look forward to seeing where this is headed.

On the downside, the battles tend to be a bit irritating. This is remedied by the game encouraging you to used ranged combat out of battle to remove monster threats. This is a clever alternative. The first and only story dungeon in the demo is composed of unavoidable fights, though. It does become grating.

Battles seemed a bit iffy, since there was no feasible income outside of chests in the demo. This did give a greater sense of 'dog-eat-dog' to the proceedings, but I wonder what the difficulty ramp will be like in the final game.

A fairly minor complaint, but the text speed on dialogue is a little slow for my tastes. It does suit the game tone, though.

The pit fighting mode shows promise. Entering key combinations is a lot more fun than the popular 'Rock Paper Scissors' style of alternative combat seen in most other games.

Overall, this is probably the best RPG Maker XP game I've seen thus far.