Sand Land is like a sanitized Mad Max Fury Road in the manga style, where there are fewer explosions and no one is sniffing paint and shouting “Be a witness!” So you could say it’s a less frosty Mad Max. In this version, it’s an open-world action game with featherlight RPG elements; in previous versions, it’s a manga and anime from the creator of Dragon Ball. My takeaway from playing Sand Land is that it’s an incredible advertisement for the manga and anime, in the sense that everything good in a Sand Land game comes from them, and I’d rather read or watch them.
The game’s plot follows – as far as I can gather, since I don’t know the source material – the plot of the anime that expanded on the original manga. You play as Prince Beelzebub, a petite but very powerful demonic rogue who, along with his friend Thief, joins an elderly soldier from the human army to bring water back to the giant desert that is Sand Land. Ever since the war for the remaining water source decades ago, the King has been in control of secret source of water – and thus control of the population of his kingdom. You (spoilers) manage to free the water in a tiny time, at which point the threat from the neighboring Forest Land is revealed.
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Helping you on your quests are Ann, a master mechanic from Daisy Dukes and the secretive who builds Prince & Co. a selection of vehicles and mechs (called bots) to speed you along. First you get a tank, then a jumper mech and a motorcycle, but you can get others like a hopper and a hover car. You can upgrade and customize them with up-to-date weapons and additional abilities – a flaming thruster, seeker missiles, or simply better armor. When you’re in the world, you can switch between them as needed, or jump out of them to hit enemies directly.
Here you can complete a few bounty contracts, rescue a few locals, engage in regularly scheduled boss fights, have a house, and dash around the environment collecting crafting materials, hitting trees, or shooting dinosaurs. You can upgrade yourself and your companions by adding up-to-date combat skills (hit really challenging, etc.). There’s an occasional stealth section, but they’re so scarce I almost forget to mention them. Sometimes there’s what, thanks to the generosity of Harvester’s unlimited salad bar, I’ll call a puzzle dungeon.
I’m explaining the game’s basic functions in a very arid way, first because it’s thematically very apt, and second because in practice it’s all terribly uninteresting. This is something of an achievement, because the characters and the premise are great; the scarce interactions between Prince and his father are very amusing, Thief, as a concept, is my favorite, and the animation and direction in the cutscenes are fantastic. I particularly enjoyed the recurring family group known as the Swimmers, a muscular middle-aged man and his gigantic adult sons who scurry around in swimming trunks, and General Cow, a bear boy with a motorcycle and a military commission.
But most of that can, presumably, be attributed to the source material, which seems great. Translated into the game, though, you’re basically just cruising through mostly empty spaces at moderate speeds. The vehicles you’re doing this in feel different to handle, but there’s little to separate them from the weapons, so you only really swap between bots when you need to get into a mech that can jump – a feature of repetitive dungeons that quickly becomes infuriating when you have to switch from your bike to your jump bot to jump over a slightly too-high crate, then get out of it to cross a petite gap as Prince. It feels less like fun and more like a commitment test, like when Netflix asks you to keep watching to make sure you didn’t die in your chair before eight hours of Physical 100.
Building vehicles is kind of fun, and finding a up-to-date weapon or engine in the wasteland lights a brief spark of excitement in your chest. But you have so many vehicle types that it ends up feeling more like administration, and there are some things missing—like the ability to pin resources you need to parts to make it an busy mission—that would make it easier and more engaging. You also lack the commitment you get in, say, a real-life Mad Max game, where you only had one vehicle that you put all your time and attention into, making it a partner rather than a means to an end. That doesn’t happen in Sand Land.
There’s actually very little that really sticks with you. The sidequests to expand your home base, Spiro, are pretty much all “kill X monsters.” The dungeons are as boring as water in a ditch. The world is larger but impressively empty. There are hidden caves and traversal challenges, but you quickly realize that all of these places are just resource boxes, not anything really surprising or invigorating — and the map doesn’t mark them once you’ve done them, which is really annoying. After the first stage of Sand Land, the Spiro expansion starts, and you get to explore more of the map, so things get a little more fascinating. But Forest Land just changes the look of the experience by adding a few trees and grass instead of adding actual content. And it requires — I can’t stress this enough — fucking eternity to even get to this point: at least ten hours of traipsing back and forth across the same little patch of desert. There’s a lot of going into town to have one conversation and then leaving immediately, which doesn’t treat war with the urgency I think it needs.
Combat, whether in or out of the cockpit, feels weightless, as if you’ve disconnected yourself from the controller. It becomes especially routine in boss fights, where the difficulty—which you’ll think is inconsequential until the boss fight—is turned artificially tough by taking place in a strange arena with lasers. The barking in combat repeats itself with punishing frequency (after one fight with Cow, I thought, “How about Molotov!“playing pinball around my skull for hours.) This should definitely be a very invigorating game.
Even though Sand Land is a game that focuses on travel, I mostly used swift travel because there was nothing happening in the game world that I was afraid to miss. All of this made me feel uninterested and irritated – oh, but I to want go there! – which I guess is in character for a youthful demon with restricted playtime. I’ll watch anime now instead.
This review was prepared based on a test version of the game provided by the publishers.
