Sand Land Review: Well, So It Goes!

Sand Land feels like a game plucked from the start of the millennium, for better and for worse. The action RPG is based on Akira Toriyama’s 2000s manga series of the same name, and bears the heavy weight of being one of the last projects the artist was involved in before his death earlier this year. In Sand Land, you play the fiend prince Beelzebub as he and his companions embark on a journey to find a water source for his country, which has long been besieged by drought.

The game largely follows the plot of the anime adaptation, which was released in 2023 and expanded on the original manga by adding a whole new story arc. In fact, the game sometimes follows the anime so closely that it adopts entire scenes, dialogue included, but since the game is entirely from Beelzebub’s point of view, there are some significant variations. Necessarily, the story of the game and the anime have similar qualities – some interesting explorations of human greed and evil, the traumas of war and genocide, prejudice, and compelling redemption arcs galore.

Unfortunately, the anime is better. Sand Land’s tale falls flat in video game form because it lacks the attention to detail that defines the series it draws so heavily from. While the core story is compelling, Beelzebub being the player’s point of view takes out much needed nuance and context about how the world got to be this way, and the dialogue between characters mostly ranges from mediocre to laughably bad, with a significant amount of obvious exposition dumping. The relationships between the characters aren’t as fleshed out, nor is the characterisation particularly strong, which is a huge disappointment considering that those aspects are so well-developed in the anime adaptation.

The VA cast behind the English dub of the anime reprise their roles in the game, and their performances range from excellent – Muniel’s voice actor elevates the character with the perfect depiction of the most annoying antagonist to ever exist – to tragically unconvincing, which unfortunately led to some already mediocre dialogue sounding downright terrible in combination with lacklustre line reads. I have a suspicion that, like with the anime, the Japanese dub would have been more convincing, but there’s no option to change the audio language.

It’s not all bad. The game’s art style renders Toriyama’s excellently designed characters in a 3D world, which looks extraordinarily cool at times. While Sand Land, being a bleak and barren landscape, doesn’t look particularly interesting, the Forest Land that you enter in the second arc of the game is full of mountains, greenery and waterfalls that are much more appealing to the eye.

Using vehicles, which lies at the core of the gameplay, is also a blast. Over the course of the game, you get access to a number of different vehicles, all of which are useful in different situations. Like in the manga, your first vehicle is a tank stolen from the Royal Army, which quickly became my go-to in combat situations. You get a jump-bot, which does what it says on the tin, allowing you to hop up rock formations and across big gaps. Your motorbike is extremely fast, letting you practically fly across huge expanses of desert. You’ll unlock a hover-car as well, which lets you cross over water without drowning the demon prince.

Switching between vehicles is fast and seamless, so you can hop between them within a second, even in the midst of battle. Combat is simplistic – most fights can be taken on with your trusty tank as long as you keep moving out of the way of projectile attacks, which does make them a bit rote. Boss battles often require a little more experimentation with tactics, a little creative thinking, quick reflexes, and an eye on enemy attack patterns. There’s also some room to tinker with different builds as you collect vehicle parts of different rarity and utility, allowing you to upgrade your favourite primary and secondary weapons (usually a projectile launcher and a gun) and customise your vehicles to your play style.

Mercifully, most of the combat is vehicle-based, and there are only a few instances in which you’ll be forced to fight with your fists. While Beelzebub has a skill tree, as do his other companions, and powers he can use to fling rocks at enemies and unleash powerful AOE attacks, melee combat largely comes down to using the same combo over and over and incorporating some timely dodging. Your companions can help you out in combat, with active skills enabled in their own skill trees, but their effects are largely passive and they rarely contribute actively in combat, if at all.

You’ll be doing a lot of fighting just moving through Sand Land’s open world, murdering soldiers, bandits and wildlife alike. For a game so focused on environmentalism and doing the right thing, there sure is a lot of wanton killing. But violence also rewards you with important and necessary resources that you need for upgrading your vehicle. The open world is one of Sand Land’s biggest issues – it’s boring. You search caves for loot, hop up rocks to open chests, and find campsites where you can rest. You kill the same old animals, collecting the same old resources. There was an opportunity for the game to change things up with the move to Forest Land, but this opportunity is squandered. You end up killing the same enemies and animals with slightly different names and abilities, to collect slightly different resources.

The side quests are also boring. Early in the game you establish your base in Spino, a derelict town that you can build up over time by encouraging people you find to move there. The more residents you recruit, the more merchants set up shop there, and the more goods become easily accessible to you.

The more work you put in, the more Spino thrives – it’s quite satisfying to see the town grow, and your residents will ask favours of you to make their lives better. Some of these quests are pretty well-written and even funny, but at their core, they’re all just fetch quests that push you into the open world to find resources, items, or people. Unfortunately, some also detract from the game. Without getting into spoilers, I’ll say that there are a couple of side quests that stray into very dark territory, and the tonal incongruence with what is overall a very lighthearted game gave me serious whiplash.

Sand Land’s biggest issue is that it never takes off the kid gloves. It holds your hand through absolutely everything. There are a series of side quests that teach you about mechanics that you likely figured out on your own the moment they became available to you. Waypoints lead you through every step of surmounting terrain, which can be helpful if you can’t be bothered to explore different routes to an area, but remove the need for self-driven exploration.

As you move through the world, the characters will pipe up with useless advice, telling you to check the map if you get lost, and instructing you to shoot through boulders obstructing your way two seconds after you’ve already done it. They’ll even tell you to check your gear regularly, which I guess is useful if Sand Land is the first game you’ve ever played in your life. It’s this insistence on repeatedly running through the rudiments that made me begin to wonder if Sand Land truly is geared primarily towards children, but the tonal inconsistencies made me question the plausibility of that being the case.

The jankiness doesn’t help. Characters ruminate on mysteries that have already been solved. Dialogue repeats over, and over, and over. Your companions switch rapidly between separate conversations at the same time. Some of the smiling animations are downright scary, especially with the Picchi. Some quests seem slightly bugged – I ended the first story arc and saw no additional main quests in the log, leaving me with the incorrect assumption that I had to keep doing side quests to progress to the next arc. You might find this endearing and reminiscent of the PS2 era of games, but I have no nostalgia for that time.

I enjoyed my time with Sand Land, despite its many flaws. The vehicle gameplay feels great, and it’s the main pull for me – I didn’t mind that the side quests were pointless and the open world samey, because I had an incredibly powerful tank that could blow up small groups of enemies in two seconds. But if you’re hoping that this game will be the best adaptation of Toriyama’s manga series, you’re out of luck. I’d just watch the anime instead.

Sand Land

Reviewed on PS5.

Developer(s)

ILCA

Genre(s)

Action RPG

Pros

• Vehicle gameplay feels fun, if sometimes rote
• Boss battles are well-tuned in difficulty
• Core story is compelling and thematically interesting

Cons

• Uninteresting open world full of fetch quests
• Dialogue and English voice acting is mediocre
• Very little variety in traversal and enemy variety
• Lots of jank