Sand Land Review

Sand Land, as it was known before today, has been around for two decades in the form of a manga series written and illustrated by the creator of Dragon Ball, the late Akira Toriyama. Now, the beloved manga has come to life in the form of an open-world action RPG by ILCA and Bandai Namco Entertainment that faithfully adapts the world of Sand Land and its characters to deliver a heartwarming adventure worth experiencing firsthand. While the execution of its open world leaves a bit to be desired, Sand Land does plenty of things right that fans of JRPGs and fulfilling progression will enjoy.

Sand Land‘s story sees the Fiend Prince Beelzebub setting out on an adventure with an unlikely team of companions in search of the Legendary Spring, as the desert world of Sand Land suffers from an extreme water shortage. As Beelzebub, players will lead this group of misfits on a journey across a massive open world teeming with enemies to defeat and interesting characters to meet. It is a one-of-a-kind experience and a rather surprising addition to the JRPG genre.

Sand Land Is a Heartwarming Adventure With Memorable Characters

The highlight of Sand Land is undeniably its story and characters. The story has a bit of a slow start but quickly picks up after its first false ending. In typical modern JRPG fashion, Sand Land‘s story is cheesy but endearing, as what begins as a quest for the Legendary Spring leads to a much bigger problem than Beelzebub and his friends had originally anticipated.

Sand Land‘s characters are what make the whole adventure worth experiencing. As the story progresses, the relationship between Beelzebub and his companions improves and the game’s charm increases as a result. Beelzebub is one of the game’s most likable characters, mainly due to his playful personality. As a demon, he tries his best to appear as evil and tough as possible, and yet his kindhearted nature always gets the best of him. His faithful companion, Thief, despite being named for his ability to pilfer others’ valuable items without being seen, is a very honorable and trustworthy friend and often takes on the role of wise advisor to Beelzebub during their travels.

When it comes to Sand Land‘s main characters, most of its character development happens with Beelzebub’s human companions, Rao and Ann. As it turns out, Rao has a much more extensive history than the rest of the characters are initially aware of, and it all comes to light as the game’s first act comes to an end. Despite having one of the poorest vocal performances in Sand Land, Rao is still a compelling character in the ways that matter most. Ann is another likable character with an important backstory, but her primary role in the team is outfitting them with powerful and effective vehicles that can help them accomplish their tasks.

Sand Land’s Progression Reinvents the Wheel

Unlike most action RPGs, which usually tie progression to the player’s gear, Sand Land‘s progression largely revolves around its vehicles. As players make their way through Sand Land‘s story, they will unlock several different vehicles for use in combat and traversal. Each vehicle comes with its own benefits and abilities, and they can be swapped almost instantaneously whether players are in or out of combat.

Sand Land‘s vehicle customization is very deep, as it is the primary means players increase their combat power. Each part of a vehicle can be customized — including its primary weapon, secondary weapon, engine, and suspension — to allow for a highly personalized experience and satisfying progression. In Sand Land‘s endgame, players will begin acquiring special parts (Epic, Legendary, and Mythical) for their vehicles that will make them even more powerful, so it’s worth getting to that point sooner rather than later.

While most of Sand Land‘s combat is spent behind the wheel of a vehicle, Beelzebub and his friends are not without their own combat skills when fighting on foot. Beelzebub has a skill tree with several different combat abilities to unlock, and his companions have their own as well, with passive and active skills that can benefit the Fiend Prince and his vehicles. Unfortunately, skill points for unlocking these abilities are hard to earn in Sand Land, as kills and quests provide a trivial amount of experience.

Another key aspect of Sand Land‘s progression is the city of Spino, which doubles as the team’s home base and is one of the game’s most innovative features. An increasingly popular feature in open-world games is an ever-evolving world, and that’s precisely what Spino brings to the table. In Sand Land‘s early game, players will visit the rundown, dilapidated city of Spino and will be tasked with ensuring it gets rebuilt. Rather than physically building it or gathering materials for it, players rebuild Spino by completing side quests. Certain side quests in the game, once completed, will see various characters moving to Spino where they will set up a new shop or offer cosmetic additions that will spruce up the city’s visuals.

Once players completely rebuild Spino, they will have access to almost every kind of material and vehicle part in the game, so long as they have the funds and materials to either purchase or trade for them. This effectively makes Sand Land‘s side quests more than worth completing, which often proves to be a tough obstacle for open-world games to overcome. Sand Land‘s side quests are fairly typical for an open-world title, meaning they usually involve players either fetching or killing something, but their stories can be surprisingly captivating and emotional. However, the true reward comes when these individuals move to Spino and the city changes.

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Sand Land’s Open World Is Repetitive But Rewarding

In one sense, Sand Land works as an open-world game, as the premise revolves around a massive desert wasteland that is in dire need of water. Giving players miles of land to traverse between objectives helps to reinforce that feeling of emptiness that the story is doing its best to drive home. However, in another sense, Sand Land might have been able to get by without such a large open world, primarily because much of the land in the game is far too underutilized to justify its existence. Thankfully, later in the game, players can acquire a much faster vehicle that can get them from one point to another rather quickly, and there are plenty of fast-travel points to allow players to easily skip what can otherwise be long, empty trips.

For the most part, Sand Land‘s open world is vast and empty, with not much innovation to show for it. It takes after more infamous open-world models, such as Ubisoft’s, by having a sprawling world to explore that is filled with often meaningless and uninteresting activities. Modern open-world games have been known to receive criticism on account of their maps being cluttered with icons, all but making their activities more like chores than anything else. Sand Land isn’t quite as cluttered as some, but it’s not the number of activities that creates bloat — it’s the quality of those activities.

Exploration can be rewarding for the materials and vehicle parts that players can find. Still, the copy-and-paste nature of most of the game’s dungeons, caves, and other explorable locations makes for a largely unfulfilling experience. It can quickly lead to burnout if players don’t pace themselves. Sand Land‘s dungeons primarily consist of ruins that are generally visually and structurally identical to one another, but exploring them can reward players with valuable coins that they can trade for worthwhile items. Caves are very shallow and there are an overwhelming number of them, but they often contain plenty of materials and sometimes even rare vehicle parts. Much like Ubisoft’s Far Cry series, players can find and repair radio towers in Sand Land that will reveal the surrounding area and any activities in the immediate vicinity, but doing so often only serves to clutter the map even more.

During exploration, dialogue between Beelzebub and his companions can get repetitive very quickly, to the point that players will begin hearing the same statements repeated within the first hour of the game. If a conversation is ever interrupted for any reason, it will start over again at the next available opportunity, meaning players could hear the same conversation repeated dozens of times if they don’t exhaust it before moving on. That being said, this dialogue changes slightly over time as the story progresses and the characters develop their relationships with one another, and this all serves to add to Sand Land‘s charm and heartwarming nature.

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Sand Land Can Prove a Bit Rough Around the Edges

Despite everything it has going for it, Sand Land isn’t without its rough edges. There aren’t many technical problems to speak of but Sand Land‘s most glaring issues come down to its quality of life and certain gameplay choices. With open-world exploration being such a huge part of Sand Land, one would expect its map to be intuitive. Unfortunately, Sand Land is full of winding roads and cliffs and the map fails to depict those features on a three-dimensional plane, so it can be very challenging to discern how to get from point A to point B when it’s generally not a straight line.

As far as Sand Land‘s gameplay issues go, the most troublesome issue comes into play with the game’s stealth segments. For the most part, they feel out of place in the whole experience and are just not executed very well. There are no skills associated with stealth, so each of these segments usually ends up being a trial-and-error experience more than anything else. Additionally, Sand Land occasionally provides opportunities for player agency, like choosing between two NPCs to move to Spino City. However, these moments are few and far between, so it’s difficult to feel like there isn’t some missed potential here. Still, any amount of player agency can be a refreshing change of pace.

Sand Land‘s story, characters, and progression are among its best features, all of which stand out in the JRPG genre and are fondly remembered, even after the credits roll. While its open world may rely a bit too much on the open-world model that many gamers have come to dislike, its exploration still proves to be a rewarding venture that feeds into its satisfying progression system. ILCA and Bandai Namco Entertainment have created something worthwhile in Sand Land, suitable for fans of the original manga and newcomers alike.

Sand Land

Reviewed on PS5

Bandai Namco and ILCA’s Sand Land is an action RPG based on a shonen manga created by Akira Toriyama. On an unforgiving desert world, Beelzebub – a demon – is on a quest to find a legendary spring. Along with melee action, Sand Land focuses heavily on vehicular combat.

Pros

• Memorable story and characters
• Fulfilling side quests
• Satisfying progression system
• Innovative vehicle customization

Cons

• Generic and repetitive open world
• Unintuitive map cluttered with icons
• Underutilized stealth segments

Sand Land is available now on PS4/PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC. Game Rant was provided with a PS5 code for this review.