Sand Land is an action RPG where you become the main character as Beelzebub, a Fiend Prince. Lead your company of heroic misfits and explore the legendary world of Sand Land developed by the creator of Dragon Ball & Dr. Slump, Akira Toriyama.
Reviews View More
It's a faithful retelling of the manga/anime in game form. Combat is engaging enough for a bit but get repetitive after a while. I think I'll stick to recommending the anime instead but this is certainly a fine way to experience the story for the first time.
Sand Land é um jogo muito especial. Uma aventura tranquila de se jogar com um humor muito divertido e bobo. O jogo tem uma boa narrativa, que evolue e te surpreende, e personagens muito cativantes. Sério, você vai adorar os personagens. A gameplay é simples, você não vai encontrar dificuldade e mundo é vasto pra quem curte explorar. Além disso, há muitos veiculos, que são parte importantissima do jogo.
The Sand Land resurgence is upon us! Originally a short, one volume manga, it was my favorite Toriyama work, and I felt it was woefully underappreciated for most of my life. Now, we have a new movie as well as a new TV series, and the latter is what this game is (mostly) based on.
Going into it, I assumed it would be nothing but vehicular combat. To my surprise, and a little bit of dismay, Sand Land starts out with a whole lot of on-foot stuff. You have combat, which isn't good, and stealth, which reminded me a lot of Lupin III and the Treasure of the Sorcerer King. Make of that what you will.
Thankfully, you do eventually get in a tank, and from that point it's about 95% vehicle combat. And it's fun! You get a wide variety of vehicles you can build and customize, and they fall into roughly 5 categories (Tank, Walker, Bike, Hovercraft, Mech), with each having their own use. Hovercrafts are good for large bodies of water or quicksand, bikes are the fastest, and mechs can move crates around to find hidden stuff. You can swap between vehicles instantly anywhere, too, which is nice. In combat, you're pretty much always going to be using the tank, or the walker if you're indoors.
Speaking of indoors, the interior dungeons are the weakest point. While the open wastelands are fun to traverse and explore, the dungeons have a lot of copy-pasted rooms that feel tedious to navigate. Specifically, when running around some of those in the walker mech, it felt a whole lot like Mega Man Legends (derogatory).
Customization of your vehicles is pretty good, but I feel like you could have a better variety of weapons. There are probably 3-4 main variants of each of them, and then tiers of rarity determining their power. What's REALLY annoying is that if you find a good part, you can't equip it until your vehicle's base level is high enough, and the materials to level that up are story-gated. As I was trucking around the wasteland, I was finding cool guns that I wouldn't be able to equip until I had beaten the final boss. It ends up discouraging exploration, though at least there aren't many hard barriers, and the game is very generous with fast-travel points.
By completing sidequests, you also improve your home base town of Spino, and I'm a sucker for this kind of thing. Getting more people to move in and transforming it from a bombed-out husk into a vibrant, bustling village full of weirdos activates the primate neurons in my brain.
There is a LOT to do in this game, by the way. Too much, I would say! I thought I was almost done with the game... And then it turns out there's a SECOND MAP. I think everything that happens over there is from the show, which I haven't watched, but the game also introduces some Game-Original Characters, who always stick out like a sore thumb. They don't look like Toriyama designs at all. That's especially funny since the random NPCs do, just using the standard Dragon Quest mix-and-match method.
Anyway, the story is good. It's massively expanded from the original manga, of course, but it has some nice (if predictable) twists and didn't really drag at any point. The voice acting is mostly good, though Beelz has some lines where he says things with the wrong inflection. That's not on the actor, though, that's the voice director's responsibility. The sidequests are okay. Many of them are fetchquests, but thanks to the copious fast-travel points they aren't a hassle.
I would say all of this adds up to a solid 7/10, but... You've already seen the score. And it's that way for one particular reason.
Nobody. Ever. Shuts. The. Fuck. UP.
EVER!
While tooling around the world, there is CONSTANT chatter from your team, and they repeat the same conversations OVER, and OVER, and OVER. Sometimes immediately after finishing a conversation they'll just say the same thing again. "Hey, what would you do if you saw a tough enemy?" "Maybe these ruins were a playground!" "Who's the second-strongest demon in Demon Village?" I love the characters of Sand Land but oh my god I wanted to twist Beelzebub's head off his neck, or maybe crack his noggin on the floor like the Hulkster did to the Other Belz.
I have to believe this is a bug. There's no way they intended for characters to remind you to use your goddamn map every 10 minutes. It's probably an error that Beelz says "we could get up there if we had a bot that can jump" when you already have one, and have been using it for 20 hours. I hope it's a bug. It is so supremely irritating that, by itself, I have to drop this 2 points. If this ever gets patched, let me know in the comments, and I'll revise this accordingly. Considering there have been zero updates since release, I don't have high hopes.
In the meantime, this is one of the best Podcast Games out there. Get some, uhhh, Marc Maron in your ears and blast bandits while he asks Andrew Dice Clay if they have beef, I guess. Maybe someday we'll get an open-world Cowa! or Dr. Slump game.
5/10
PROTIP: Do NOT use your team skill points on skills that are useless or you don't want (Thief's sabotage ability, Rao's stun gun, etc), even if you have a surplus of points, because about 3/4 into the game you get Ann's skill tree and she has some of the best skills in the game (free vehicle repair on a minute cooldown, for example). It's worth saving points to unlock all of those immediately.
Going into it, I assumed it would be nothing but vehicular combat. To my surprise, and a little bit of dismay, Sand Land starts out with a whole lot of on-foot stuff. You have combat, which isn't good, and stealth, which reminded me a lot of Lupin III and the Treasure of the Sorcerer King. Make of that what you will.
Thankfully, you do eventually get in a tank, and from that point it's about 95% vehicle combat. And it's fun! You get a wide variety of vehicles you can build and customize, and they fall into roughly 5 categories (Tank, Walker, Bike, Hovercraft, Mech), with each having their own use. Hovercrafts are good for large bodies of water or quicksand, bikes are the fastest, and mechs can move crates around to find hidden stuff. You can swap between vehicles instantly anywhere, too, which is nice. In combat, you're pretty much always going to be using the tank, or the walker if you're indoors.
Speaking of indoors, the interior dungeons are the weakest point. While the open wastelands are fun to traverse and explore, the dungeons have a lot of copy-pasted rooms that feel tedious to navigate. Specifically, when running around some of those in the walker mech, it felt a whole lot like Mega Man Legends (derogatory).
Customization of your vehicles is pretty good, but I feel like you could have a better variety of weapons. There are probably 3-4 main variants of each of them, and then tiers of rarity determining their power. What's REALLY annoying is that if you find a good part, you can't equip it until your vehicle's base level is high enough, and the materials to level that up are story-gated. As I was trucking around the wasteland, I was finding cool guns that I wouldn't be able to equip until I had beaten the final boss. It ends up discouraging exploration, though at least there aren't many hard barriers, and the game is very generous with fast-travel points.
By completing sidequests, you also improve your home base town of Spino, and I'm a sucker for this kind of thing. Getting more people to move in and transforming it from a bombed-out husk into a vibrant, bustling village full of weirdos activates the primate neurons in my brain.
There is a LOT to do in this game, by the way. Too much, I would say! I thought I was almost done with the game... And then it turns out there's a SECOND MAP. I think everything that happens over there is from the show, which I haven't watched, but the game also introduces some Game-Original Characters, who always stick out like a sore thumb. They don't look like Toriyama designs at all. That's especially funny since the random NPCs do, just using the standard Dragon Quest mix-and-match method.
Anyway, the story is good. It's massively expanded from the original manga, of course, but it has some nice (if predictable) twists and didn't really drag at any point. The voice acting is mostly good, though Beelz has some lines where he says things with the wrong inflection. That's not on the actor, though, that's the voice director's responsibility. The sidequests are okay. Many of them are fetchquests, but thanks to the copious fast-travel points they aren't a hassle.
I would say all of this adds up to a solid 7/10, but... You've already seen the score. And it's that way for one particular reason.
Nobody. Ever. Shuts. The. Fuck. UP.
EVER!
While tooling around the world, there is CONSTANT chatter from your team, and they repeat the same conversations OVER, and OVER, and OVER. Sometimes immediately after finishing a conversation they'll just say the same thing again. "Hey, what would you do if you saw a tough enemy?" "Maybe these ruins were a playground!" "Who's the second-strongest demon in Demon Village?" I love the characters of Sand Land but oh my god I wanted to twist Beelzebub's head off his neck, or maybe crack his noggin on the floor like the Hulkster did to the Other Belz.
I have to believe this is a bug. There's no way they intended for characters to remind you to use your goddamn map every 10 minutes. It's probably an error that Beelz says "we could get up there if we had a bot that can jump" when you already have one, and have been using it for 20 hours. I hope it's a bug. It is so supremely irritating that, by itself, I have to drop this 2 points. If this ever gets patched, let me know in the comments, and I'll revise this accordingly. Considering there have been zero updates since release, I don't have high hopes.
In the meantime, this is one of the best Podcast Games out there. Get some, uhhh, Marc Maron in your ears and blast bandits while he asks Andrew Dice Clay if they have beef, I guess. Maybe someday we'll get an open-world Cowa! or Dr. Slump game.
5/10
PROTIP: Do NOT use your team skill points on skills that are useless or you don't want (Thief's sabotage ability, Rao's stun gun, etc), even if you have a surplus of points, because about 3/4 into the game you get Ann's skill tree and she has some of the best skills in the game (free vehicle repair on a minute cooldown, for example). It's worth saving points to unlock all of those immediately.
I had previously made a joke with a friend where I said I'm glad that I'm the guy playing Sand Land and not the guy playing Stellar Blade, and I couldn't stop thinking about it for the first 10 hours of this game. In a lot of ways it feels like one of the more important forks in the branching path of my life's destiny. I don't care about particle effects anymore, I care about having an absurd amount of material types to collect and craft into other material types, that are then crafted into vehicle parts, that are then crafted into vehicles but only if you are able to fuse it all together with more insane material types. The fact that some of the materials are broken down further into B-Grade, Quality, and Strong types is highly amusing. I don't want jiggle physics, I want to cruise around in my tank. I dont want to hack OR slash, I want to blast bad guys, and then get a lil animation of them running off instead of dying.
I think having a lifetime of exposure to Dragonball/DBZ really desensitized me to exactly what makes Toriyama's work so charming. As much as I appreciate DB/DBZ, I'm so used to that world and those characters that I kind of forget what made it appealing to a young gamerjoe in the first place. Dropping into a new (to me) Toriyama world really shines the spotlight on what's so charming about his works.
I think having a lifetime of exposure to Dragonball/DBZ really desensitized me to exactly what makes Toriyama's work so charming. As much as I appreciate DB/DBZ, I'm so used to that world and those characters that I kind of forget what made it appealing to a young gamerjoe in the first place. Dropping into a new (to me) Toriyama world really shines the spotlight on what's so charming about his works.
I miss games that do not contain today's political messages and only contain story and characters.
Worst game I’ve played in 2024 so far. Hated every second after the first few hours but had to complete story at the minimum.