'Sand Land' review
If nothing else, Sand Land is a testament to its legendary creator’s timeless charm.
Going into this video game adaptation of a 24-year-old manga by Dragon Ball creator Akira Toriyama, I wasn’t sure how to feel. Bandai Namco’s numerous adaptations of manga and anime (it’s published pretty much every recent Naruto and Dragon Ball and One Piece game) have mostly left me cold over the years. Put simply, they tend to be pretty average video games wrapped in the shell of something you already know and love — and that doesn’t always do it for me.
Normally, it’s not a big deal if a licensed game comes out and isn’t great, but Sand Land took on an extra burden when Toriyama tragically passed away at the beginning of March. In a sense, it feels like this game needs to be good. Even if his involvement may have mostly been in a supervisory role, Sand Land is one of the last things Toriyama worked on.
Thankfully, Sand Land is, at the very least, not bad. Its basic open-world design benefits from a unique vehicular hook, a lighthearted story with a likable cast of characters, and the fact that it doesn’t overstay its welcome by too much. As a big time Toriyama fan, I’ll remember it as a solid way to spend 25 hours in a world devised by one of the best to ever do it, less than two months after he was taken from us.
Sand Land plot
One of my favorite things about Sand Land as both a fan of video games and a fan of Toriyama’s work is how much its setting plays with familiar tropes while managing to stand on its own.
What I mean by that is that Sand Land is a post-apocalyptic story like many other video games, but it doesn’t feel anywhere near as dreary or hopeless as contemporaries like The Last of Us.
Set 50 years after a vaguely described war reduced a fictional kingdom to, well, sand, Sand Land tells a story of hope, peaceful co-existence, and rebuilding. What starts as a straightforward story about finding a reliable water source for Sand Land’s remaining citizens eventually centers around things like redemption, the morality of war itself, what it means to be good and evil, and who ultimately gets to be good and evil.
Mind you, Sand Land doesn’t go especially deep on any of those subjects, but that’s fine. Some of Dragon Ball Z’s most potent messages were mostly there to justify another 10 episodes of guys powering up and yelling at each other. In Sand Land, the contents of the cutscenes exist to get you to the next batch of bad guys to blow up with tank shells.
Put another way, I appreciate that Sand Land at least gestures at being anti-war. At a time when I can’t open my phone without being confronted by horrifying images of children in mass graves, I found it mildly touching that Sand Land occasionally takes a second to say something as simple as “genocide is bad,” even if it’s in the same kid-friendly tone that Toriyama specialized in.
Sand Land characters
Of course, the people who populate Sand Land are what make it worth saving. It’s just that the person who does the saving is not quite who you’d expect.
Players step into the shoes of Beelzebub, the prince of demons and son of Lucifer. Yes, angels and demons are also running around doing angel and demon things in this world that humans destroyed. It’s a fun twist on the typical post-apocalyptic setting — and Beelzebub’s home village is full of goofy demon designs. I’m a big fan of the talking ferret who has a scythe, personally.
Joining Beelzbub in his journey are his fellow demon friend Thief and an elderly human sheriff with a mysterious past named Rao. It doesn’t take long before that trio is joined by a woman named Ann, who specializes in vehicle maintenance. (More on that later.)
What I like about Beelzebub is that, being a demon, he’s generally repelled by the idea of doing good things for other people. It’s what makes him a fun protagonist. Over the course of the game, there’s some relatively satisfying character development as you see Belz (as his friends call him) very slowly come to terms with the fact that helping people can be better than pulling pranks on them.
Of course, he’s still doing good deeds for selfish reasons a lot of the time. His entire motivation for looking for a water source at the beginning of the game is that his dad will let him play more video games if he succeeds. Having said all that, though, Belz is never really a jerk to anyone. He thinks he’s supposed to be bad because that’s what demons do, but you can tell he’s not really about that life.
Sand Land mechanics
Unfortunately, Sand Land is not likely to win any awards for its open-world game design. But there’s enough meat on the bone to make it far less of a bore than, say, Rise of the Ronin was.
The elevator pitch here is “action game with silly anime vehicles instead of weapons or abilities.” Once you’ve played an hour or two and unlock the garage feature, Sand Land invites players to go to town creating their own wacky vehicles to tackle its harsh world. At first, you can only make a tank, but the roster eventually balloons to include various types of hovercraft, motorcycles, bipedal jump-bots, and humanoid battle-mechs.
To build a vehicle, you need frames and blueprints, which can be found randomly out in the world at shops or enemy encampments, or as quest rewards. Each vehicle is assembled out of parts, including primary and secondary weapons, engines, and suspensions. Naturally, every part has to be crafted out of materials you find in chests or on the corpses of enemies.
Don’t get it twisted: Sand Land has a lot of crafting in it. If you want to build the best, most fully upgraded and unstoppable vehicles, you’ll have to do some farming. If you just want to finish the story, you can mercifully skip that step and just roll with what the game gives you most of the time. This is for the best because Sand Land lacks some modern quality-of-life conveniences other farming-heavy games have, like pinning materials or even getting useful hints about where to find them. It’s often up to you to just remember where you last saw something, which can be bothersome.
The vehicular action is a good time, though. Whether you're engaging in tank battles across open fields, using a jump-bot to navigate a platforming challenge, streaking a hover-scooter across a body of water, or using a battle-bot to punch the living daylights out of other battle-bots, it’s all snappy and satisfying. A decent (but not overwhelming) variety of weapons and abilities helps add some much-needed depth, too.
I wish I could say the same for Sand Land’s on-foot sections. The game often tasks Belz with navigating through tight spaces and even fighting enemies on his own. Basic movement and platforming is responsive and forgiving, but Belz’s combat mechanics are probably Sand Land’s biggest weakness. He has some basic melee combos he can bust out to go along with a few marginally useful abilities (governed by a typical meter), but fighting enemies on foot is usually a chore at best.
The good news is you don’t have to do this very often — and many of these scenarios actually let you just pull a vehicle out and wail away on enemies in more fun ways. But if you were hoping for some good non-vehicular action, Sand Land is not the game for you.
Lastly, Sand Land has one of my favorite things any game can have: a little central hub town that grows as you play the game. The village of Spino starts off as a trash-filled dump and eventually grows into a beautiful little community, full of NPCs Belz and his crew recruited via side quests around the world.
Aside from the aesthetic charms of Spino’s gradual development, doing all of these quests will open up new shops and other quests, so I would say they are definitely worth your time.
Sand Land graphics
Akira Toriyama’s art has translated well into 3D video games for a long time and Sand Land is no different.
There isn’t much to say other than that this is often a gorgeous game to look at. For a post-apocalyptic world, Sand Land often has attractive vistas and more color than you’d expect. Characters have the kinds of big, expressive eyes you expect from Toriyama’s work — and the design work is top notch all around.
That goes for vehicles, too. Sand Land’s tanks and robots and cars all skew more towards silly than badass, and that’s for the best. Toriyama was always renowned for his vehicle designs and in this sense, Sand Land is a loving tribute to its creator. You, as the player, get to actually make the funny little cars and bikes now, and that’s a pretty good selling point for the game in general.
Sand Land soundtrack and audio
There isn’t a ton to say about Sand Land’s audio presentation, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
Music is moody and appropriate, if not especially memorable. You get some nice strumming acoustic guitar while exploring and some decent sneaking music when infiltrating enemy bases. It’s all fine, but I probably wouldn’t go out of my way to listen to any of it outside of the game.
Voice acting, too, is adequate but not spectacular. It sounds like the English dub of an anime, for better and worse. You’ll either vibe with the shouty, intentional obnoxiousness of Belz or you won’t. I did, but I can’t promise that you will.
Sand Land challenge and difficulty
On its default difficulty setting, Sand Land is not particularly challenging. As long as you update your vehicles’ gear at regular intervals, you’ll be fine. The same goes for regularly stocking up on healing supplies at shops, as those are pretty cheap and money quickly stops being a problem midway through the game.
My one real criticism of the vehicle fights in Sand Land is that they don’t often take full advantage of the mechanics available to them. An early tutorial asks you to position your tank at an angle to shoot targets in the sky since tank cannons can’t aim straight up, but the game never really asks you to consider that again. You can also switch between up to five different vehicles on the fly, even during fights, but very few encounters actually incentivize this.
The nuances are there, so why not use them?
Sand Land performance
I can only speak to the PlayStation 5 version of Sand Land, but it runs nearly flawlessly at 60 frames per second. There are occasional, very small dips when a lot of smoke effects are on screen, but while these are visible to the naked eye, I never found them that distracting. As soon as the smoke clears a second or two later, things are back to normal.
Oh, and the load times are nearly instantaneous, too. It helps a lot when fast traveling back and forth between places.
Is Sand Land worth it?
Based entirely on its merits as an open-world action game, Sand Land is merely decent. It plays fine, boasting a few enjoyable concepts that it occasionally fails to fully exploit. However, it lacks distinctiveness in design and mechanics. Its 25-hour-ish playtime is also fairly slight by modern genre standards, but considering you can play that much of Starfield while barely seeing the game and also being bored the entire time, I’m not so sure that’s a bad thing.
Whether Sand Land is for you depends on your affection for the original manga or Toriyama’s work in general. As a lifelong Dragon Ball fan who has never read Sand Land, I found the game to be a comforting little sojourn back into the mind of a man whose work shaped my childhood.
Toriyama’s ability to draw funny little guys doing funny little things in funny little places was nearly unmatched, and the Sand Land game is a pretty good tribute to that.
If you were captivated by Toriyama's blend of charmingly juvenile humor, excessively theatrical fights, abundant yelling, ludicrous vehicle designs, or the underlying humanity woven throughout, chances are you'll find something to like in Sand Land.