Sand Land review: A beat of its own

It took a little while for me to figure out what Sand Land was. The anime RPG takes bits and pieces of other genres and games and glues them together, and since it takes a long while to get going, you’re left for several hours wondering what, exactly, the point is. After I dressed an old man in a Santa Claus outfit and pilfered some survival supplies, I had my answer.

Sand Land is Sand Land, for better and worse. It has its own ideas and ways of doing things, and even when they don’t always add up to something particularly exciting, it’s memorable and full of charm.

Simple and not always sweet

Sand Land loosely follows the plot of the eponymous manga from Dragon Quest creator Akira Toriyama. Wars and environmental exploitation ravaged the world, turning much of it into a sandy, barren wasteland – hence, Sand Land – where people fight for control of basic resources or die trying. Usually the latter. It’s not a nice place to live.

Demons also call Sand Land home, a motley selection of imps, talking animals, old men, weird ghosts, and slime worms. Lucifer is their king and Beelzebub their prince and the tale’s hero, but despite the overt connections with things we associate with evil, Sand Land’s demons live by a strict code. They take only what they need, and they never kill. Yes, Bub runs over people in a tank, and no, they don’t die. That’s demon magic for you, I guess.

Anyway, Sand Land is very clear, frequently, about the difference between humans and demons and wastes no opportunity to remind the player that – whatever narrative humans and their corrupt leaders might’ve spun – demons played no part in bringing the world to the brink of destruction. Humans, their rampant greed, and their ceaseless wars wrecked everything good in the world.

A select few humans also have no qualms about hoarding what few resources remain and setting extortionately high prices on them. I didn’t expect strong environmentalist themes or a kernel of righteously indignant class consciousness, but they’re here and give Sand Land’s simple narrative some welcome extra poignancy.

It sets very clear expectations about what kind of story Sand Land wants to tell. The bad guys are obvious and very bad, and the good guys all try their best to make the world a better place. That general setup is all very familiar if you’ve played any Dragon Quest games, but there’s an endearing charm to such straightforward narratives told with as much heart as Sand Land has. It also helps that Sand Land has a strong cast of well-written, mostly well-voiced characters just dripping with charm.

Sand, sand (almost) everywhere

The quest to find the Legendary Spring and deal with the human army sends Bub across Sand Land and into more visually interesting regions, but what you do during your journey changes little. It's structured like a manga serial or an anime series as well. It’s technically divided into main quests, but most of these are grouped around moments of clear build-up and resolution, with spates of downtime in between where you explore and find side quests.

You and your crew of demon and human companions commandeer vehicles of varying descriptions, ranging from tanks and robots to dinky little golf carts, and scour the world for treasure, vehicle parts, and hidden side quests that shed a bit of light on the people eking a living out in the harsh desert.

Sand Land takes an interesting approach to open-world design. It’s not crammed with puzzles like Genshin Impact or quests and battles like The Witcher 3, but it’s not as barren and perfunctorily big as Tales of Arise is. The large, empty expanse makes finding caves and other points of interest feel like a little event, even if you only find a random merchant or some vehicle components inside. Saving NPCs, exploring abandoned towns, and learning about life before the wars made the journey feel like a proper adventure, even if there were no tangible rewards to be found other than car parts.

Sand Land punctuates its questing and exploration with bouts of other game genres. Some missions send you on rudimentary little stealth excursions. There’s platforming, which is often wonky; light puzzle solving that may involve using specific vehicles in the right place; and some equally light dungeon delving. Most of it is pretty basic and forgettable, though I do appreciate how they sometimes integrate your tanks and the like.

Everything's easy when you're a demon

Combat is a similar mix of inventive and a little too basic. Beelzebub has a simple attack, a strong attack, and a special that kicks in under certain circumstances. You unlock new skills and passive buffs as you level up, and you have a handful of skills you can teach Thief and Bub’s other companions. You rarely need anything other than your basic attack until maybe a little after the halfway point, though. Enemies pose little challenge, even on hard mode, and their movements are slow and floaty enough that you can usually dodge without thinking about it too much.

Vehicle combat is easily the stronger of the two battle types, though it’s rarely as complicated as the extensive customization options available to you might suggest. You can modify your tanks and the like with new, better weapons and min-max stats until you have an absolute monster of an automobile if you want. There’s more to do in vehicular combat, with more moving parts to manage, and it’s easy to get overwhelmed if you don’t manage the battlefield correctly.

Making the biggest, baddest tank or whatever in the land isn’t strictly necessary, since the level of challenge remains fairly low, but watching Beelzebub demolish entire enemy fleets with the most ridiculously overpowered tank put a smile on my face anyway.

The thing about Sand Land is that it’s very confident in itself. It knows what it wants to be, and it achieves its goals effectively, whether those goals are what we think it should be or not. That doesn’t change how the game plays, of course. Stealth is still tedious, and combat is a bit floaty and simple. It does make the presentation stronger, though. Nothing feels half-baked or thrown in just for the sake of chasing a trend, and that confidence gives Sand Land a strong sense of identity that makes it easy to overlook some of its less engaging features.

That’s Sand Land in a nutshell, though. It’s a vibes game more than anything else, charming, sometimes surprisingly incisive, and daring enough to be its own thing. That thing isn't always as engaging as it could be, but it's certainly unforgettable.

The publisher provided the PC copy of Sand Land used for this review. Sand Land launches on April 26, 2024, for PC via Steam, PS5, and Xbox Series X|S.

Josh Broadwell

Contributing Editor

Josh is a freelance writer and reporter who specializes in guides, reviews, and whatever else he can convince someone to commission. You may have seen him on NPR, IGN, Polygon, or VG 24/7 or on Twitter, shouting about Trails. When he isn’t working, you’ll likely find him outside with his Belgian Malinois and Australian Shepherd or curled up with an RPG of some description.