Sand, sand, and more sand: welcome to ‘SAND LAND’, an open-world action title developed by ILCA and published by Bandai Namco Entertainment. A video game adaptation of the manga serialization by the late Akira Toriyama, players will trek through the wastes of Sand Land as kid slash Prince demon ‘Beelzebub’, a desolate land of heat, trash, and more importantly a severe lack of water. As for Beelzebub, he’s a cocky kid but with a good heart—along with Sheriff Rao, Thief, and Ann, the motley four head south to find the “Legendary Spring” to put an end to Sand Land’s drought once and for all.
Forget the tropics, check out what a barren desert has in store for you. Here’s a hint: tanks, vehicles, explosions, and a lot of fun.
Dusty Dunes
SAND LAND is a fairly interesting title because it not only features hand-to-hand combat systems, but also is very reliant on vehicle traversal and warfare. While you’ll often spend a lot of time on the latter, building and outfitting your vehicles with the best of the best, you’ll also want to keep leveling up Beelzebub along with his allies if you don’t want to get snagged by multiple scorpions at once. Both the protagonist along with your vehicle can level up, one organically through combat and quests while the other can be done in Ann’s garage once you’ve unlocked that—provided you have the parts and Zeni, of course.
Let’s talk about Beelzebub’s combat first, easiest one to get out of the way. The King’s son can punch, kick, and punch harder with a series of X and B button presses. He has a skill tree that unlocks more combos but you’ll mostly just be swinging away awkwardly as there is no true lock-on and you’re dependent on Beelz swinging the right way. Sometimes you’ll be forced into 2D sequences for platforming, which are (thankfully) blissfully short. Still, its a serviceable system and only gets better as you unlock more skills. Rao and Thief can help, too, with passive and active skills that you unlock for them. These can also be used during vehicle combat, which at the very least likely caught your eye in the marketing material.
SAND LAND has a number of vehicle types at your disposal: your trusty tank, a motorcycle, cars, battle bots, and more. You start with the tank and will very slowly build your arsenal of parts and the junk needed to upgrade and create new ones. There’s a variety of weapons you can slap onto just about any vehicle, such as shotguns and chain guns on motorbikes and cars while your tank and hoppers get explosive, fiery rounds and grenade launchers. Swapping engines and suspensions are key to going faster and buffing up your defence. Very important if you plan on tackling races.
The vehicle controller is very responsive and no matter the machine you control, you won’t have a hard time picking up each models quirks. For example, I would best describe the tank’s controls as flying a ghost in ‘Halo 2’, except you can drive it backwards and maintain the same level of control. The bikes and car can drift, the former especially capable of everyone’s favourite Akira drift sequence. Hoppers can bounce high, but you need to pay attention to its start up frames on walking as they will not jump until after their initial start up walk—trust me, I’m saving you from a lot of mistimed jumps here.
Speaking of speed and defence, Sand Land is a giant traversable wasteland. But it’s no Mojave, either. Sure, some of it is flatland but a lot of it is twisty and turvy, with long ramps up winding hills, giant caverns, quicksand, the works. Exploring Sand Land turned out to be a lot more fun than I expected especially as I picked up more vehicles and figured out my way around things. The in-game map is fairly unhelpful as it doesn’t do a good job of outlining the lay of the land, where things are above or below, but thankfully once you’ve found the right path you’re set (thank goodness for fast travel, too). Water Points are a good one as they are one method of healing in the game, including full revivals if you get KO’d.
Sadly, the map has its fair share of invisible walls and inaccessible locations as well, even if you could make it. Fall damage is a thing too, which is kind of weird because Beelzebub can fall quite the distance… But fall too much and it’s game over? Fairly annoying, I wish it was done away with. And at some point in the game’s story, some areas become less traversable until you complete an accompanying quest—more points for the teeth grind. And for the extra salt on the wound, yellow paint makes a return for world sign posting. I didn’t like it in ‘Resident Evil’, nor the recent ‘Vindictus’ closed alpha, and I definitely don’t like it here. It’s a lazy way to “point” players in the right direction.
But despite my grievances, SAND LAND is a lotta fun. There’s a lot of enemy variety, quests and bounty hunts take you to stronger variants of bosses you’ve fought before, ancient ruins, caverns filled with loot, etcetera etcetera. SAND LAND doesn’t build the open-world genre further in any way, but the focus on vehicle warfare (and its accompanying customisations) are its highlights. The sands of Sand Land are beautiful, especially during daytime as you see the burning hot sun glare and bounce off the sand dunes and caves. The accompanying music is fitting, consisting of congas and a dynamic acoustic rhythm depending on your battle state. And then sometimes it gets a bit weird, faux chanting and synths giving off an apocalyptic vibe to the intended areas.
For ILCA’s first attempt at a ‘true’ open-world (and as far as I can remember, probably Bandai’s) I’m left impressed.
Into the Wastes
SAND LAND is a story-driven open-world title and one that is more than happy to shuffle you through as many cutscenes as it possibly can. Not that they’re bad, far from it, I actually really enjoyed the game’s story because of how ‘weird’ it could get. No, not weird as in funny cartoon characters talking to one another, I mean “Sheriff Rao convinces Beelzebub to go on a very long journey with him by tossing him an old game console” kind of weird. Sand Land gets goofy like this pretty often but also does a great job of balancing that with themes of suffering and tragedies—things do get bleak at times, but for the most part end fairly happily.
And though our cast of characters are dealing with the lowest of the low: scum, vagabonds, you name it – our heroes don’t kill. Matter of fact, despite the large arsenal of weapons and geared up vehicles that are capable of all sorts of destruction at our table, all your baddies (and probably even Sand Land’s wildlife) do not die. Pretty impressive for our crew, despite the exhaustive setting of the game, death is extremely rare. When it does happen, however, I found it to be impactful and I definitely took note of that over the course of my playtime.
The dump that is Sand Land is largely in contribution to human nature and the game’s narrative is more than happy to slap you silly in reminder. But even then, through side quests and the mainline adventure you see the bright side of humanity. All side quests are voiced and our heroes have plenty of things to say to one another while they’re exploring, particularly regarding any quests that you’re actively taking on. Beelzebub’s dynamic with Rao works really well, thanks to the odd difference in age but available wisdom, which is bounced off of Thief and occasionally Ann when she tags along. It’s fun to listen to these characters and for me was a driving force in pursuing every available quest I could get to.
Naturally, a lot of these sidequests will help you on your adventure to the Spring. Not only are you saving the inhabitants of Sand Land one by one, but they’ll join your town hub Spino and help it prosper into a beautiful town, making your trips for parts easier and giving you other forms of customisation such as being able to paint your vehicles and the like. Worldbuilding mechanics like this always make me feel good as it gives the player a good sense of progression that doesn’t just involve the main story, even if technically Spino’s growth is tied to it.
As it is an open-world game, unfortunately conversations have a habit of getting cut short if you get to your destination faster than the developers intended. Sometimes, they will restart proper but like many games they’ll be lost to the wind, especially if it was quest-related dialogue. Big bummer, but I give credit for trying, as it isn’t as common a function as it should be. Speaking of functions, most cutscenes in SAND LAND are fairly basic, but the key cutscenes where major story development occurs look great and as far as I can tell, mostly in-engine. SAND LAND also doesn’t fade to black for encounters, properly transitioning the player from cutscene right into gameplay.
Speaking of cutscenes, this game has a lot of dialogue, available in English and Japanese voiceovers. I stuck with English and enjoyed the main cast’s performance, though I did take issue with voice direction at times. Rao especially, as sometimes he’d be yelling in situations that don’t call for it, or suddenly go from talking in a normal voice to barking out dialogue. Secondary characters were hit and miss, sometimes doing pretty well with the material at hand and other times really phoning it in.
SAND LAND offers a big beautiful dust bowl for players to explore to their hearts’ content. I found its story and its characters to be the main driver for my playthrough, but the fun vehicle combat went hand-in-hand in my enjoyment of the game. A great adaptation of a legend’s work. ∎
SAND LAND
Played on
Xbox Series X
PROS
- Great visuals and music.
- Story is entertaining as are the characters and their dynamics.
- Fun vehicle combat with great customisation.
CONS
- Crummy land combat.
- Overworld has odd invisible boundaries among other quirks.
