Alright, this game has blown through all the leeway I'm willing to give it, and I'm not going to endure another 30 hours of boredom to just complete it. I have a very high tolerance for the open world genre, but this is easily one of the most tedious and least interesting games I've played in recent memory.

To start with the positives, the game does look great. The late Akira Toriyama's character designs are excellent and even the vehicles have a nice amount of character baked into them. The game has a similar visual style to Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot, where the characters are cell shaded while the world is slightly higher fidelity. It works well and if nothing else everything here is appealing to look at. However, this game suffers heavily from the dreaded Unreal Engine shader compilation stutter. I experienced this issue on two different machines, the ROG Ally as well as an RTX 3090 desktop. While performance was generally great on both devices, stuttering would crop up whenever a new asset or effect was loaded into the game world. If you play long enough these instances become less noticeable with time, but it is still frustrating that this known issue with the engine continues to crop up in games when it is not particularly difficult for the developers to fix.

The biggest issue with this game overall is the incredibly boring and unsatisfying exploration. To start with, the majority of your vehicles are way too slow, topping out at around 50-60 mph. The world is overly large, with vast expanses of absolute nothingness between points of interest. When I started playing I didn't understand why this game needed an autopilot option, but after an hour I got it. You will spend so much time just holding the stick down as you slowly lurch towards your next objective that being able to just tap the autopilot button was a mercy. Not that there is much of interest waiting for you when you reach your destination. The majority of these are either small caves or climbable rock formations that take less than a minute to work through and reward you with a few treasure chests containing nothing but extremely common crafting materials you probably already have hundreds of. The world is absolutely brimming with this kind of cookie cutter, copy-paste map trash that most players will only bother to complete just to 'check it off the list'.

All of this might be tolerable if it fed into interesting and rewarding progression systems. Unfortunately, Sand Land has some of the most aggressive level scaling I have ever seen. Every time you level up, the entire world levels up with you, meaning you are never going to encounter enemies out in the world who are beneath your level. What's worse is that there is a fundamental disconnect between leveling and your vehicles, given that only your characters level up through experience, while vehicles require crafting materials to progress further. Effectively, leveling up is a punishment, as your vehicles don't get any stronger from it, while all the enemies do. Crafting materials are also restricted by the regions available to you and the story progress, so it's very possible to out level your vehicles, causing you to lose ground against the enemies until you progress the story further. None of this is to say the game is particularly difficult. In fact, you will likely be hard pressed to die even once to most encounters on normal difficulty, as basic circle strafing is enough to defeat the AI of almost every enemy in the game. All of this results in a lifelessly flat difficulty curve, compounding the boredom and tedium of exploration.

One negative I didn't expect came from the world building and story, which is all over the place. This game tries to juggle Toriyama brand goofiness with Fist of the North Star style post apocalyptic grittiness, and it doesn't really work. The game actually reminds me of Arkham Knight, in how you will mow people down with machine gun fire, run them over with your 2 ton death tank, only to have a character in a cutscene explain how nobody actually died and you non-lethally disabled everyone. Like, what? Really? Alright, so this is a light hearted adventure without any serious consequences. That's how it seemed anyway until I made a wrong choice in a side quest and a bandit straight up murdered an innocent girl right in front of the party. Why? Ohh, and by the way, you can't chase the bandit down and bring him to justice, because revenge is...LE BAD! This whole sequence of events was so off-putting yet asinine it just about killed any interest I had in seeing the story through to the conclusion.

I really wish there were similar games I could unconditionally recommend over this one, but most post-apocalytpic open world games all have similar issues. I can say that I have personally enjoyed both Mad Max and Metal Max Xeno a lot more than this one, and though neither of those are perfect games, I would easily recommend either of them over this one. Maybe watch the Anime version instead if you can, otherwise avoid Sand Land altogether.

tl;dr: I have made it to the end of part 1 of the story, where your starting mission has been completed. I don't think that I will continue with the rest of the game, and instead leave with a “relatively okay” taste in my mouth. This story and art can only cover the lack of depth to the vehicle combat so much. Progression is so story-focused that it incentivizes rushing to the next story objective instead of exploring the world, which seems antithetical to the open world premise of the game.


The story and the art direction are the highlights of this game. If you are a fan of Toriyama's style (in both art and storytelling), you will probably love this game. There is a mixture of anime artwork in the characters and vehicles that meshes pretty well with the more realistic environment lighting and terrain. The game makes use of both Unreal lighting and crosshatching on the character models to bring out shadows in a way that mostly works. I like the English dub of the game, and the story moments that needed to hit ended up hitting for me. The music is also stellar. I found myself sitting in the towns or in rest areas just to listen to the music.


The same cannot be said for the combat, traversal, and progression of this game, which seems to lack that same care. I don't know if this is an issue with anime games published by Bandai in general, but the same issues that I had with DRAGON BALL Z: KAKAROT's moment to moment gameplay are present here. There are two combat systems: vehicle and on foot combat. The on foot system becomes mostly irrelevant once you acquire your first weaponized vehicle (aside from its forced use in a bandit base). It borrows from hack and slashes, with a light and heavy attack and a dodge roll to evade. Combo finishers are determined by whenever you use your heavy, with the best being either on LLLH or LLLLH IMO. Small enemies will almost always be defeated with a single light combo, and larger enemies will take maybe 3. Larger enemies have super armor on certain attacks, forcing you to dodge. There is also a super meter, which allows you to perform certain super attacks once it is full (super attacks are locked behind story progression). It is basic, but definitely more engaging than the vehicle combat.

Vehicles come in different flavors oriented primarily towards either combat or traversal, but you can fight with all of them except the intro one. They all have a primary and secondary weapon: the primary is vehicle specific; the secondary is some form of machine gun in all cases. One hit from any weapon will annihilate small enemies, with larger enemies typically going down in 3 hits from a primary weapon. Your significantly increased rate of attack and your increased health pool in a vehicle makes it so that clearing out mobs is tedious on foot in comparison. Moreover, there are certain enemies (minibosses and other vehicles) that require you to use the vehicle in order to stand a chance.

Having a preferred fighting system wouldn't be that much of an issue if there was some depth to the vehicle combat, but there isn't really. Anything that doesn't go down in a few shots (i.e. only the minibosses) can be circled around and pelted with 50 shots from your primary until it goes down. Most fights take place in areas with little to no cover and a vast area to move around in, meaning that constantly strafing is really the only strategy.


Combat itself isn't rewarding in the progression sense either. Just about every single defeated enemy awards 1-3 experience points, with minibosses awarding somewhere like 15-25. Completing a story mission in contrast will award hundreds of XP. Given that level requirements are in the 500-700 range, you will probably only get your level up after a story beat. Sidequests and bounty missions also don't award XP, focusing on either items or money instead. This really hinders the incentive to explore outside of needing materials for a specific quest or upgrade. Moreover, enemies “scale” to your level, and by that, I mean that their displayed level goes up. Their XP and item drops are still the same, and they will still be defeated in the same number of hits. This combination makes it feel like the only time you are making actual progress is when you complete a story quest; everything else feels like shallow filler that exists to pad the runtime.

Later, you unlock the ability to change out your weapons, add specific boosts to certain systems (e.g. speed, decreased reload time) or have vehicle-specific overdrives (similar to active combat skills) that provide a limited time boost. Strafe and shoot is still the best strategy so most of these weapons feel either irrelevant or redundant. Being able to temporarily disable an enemy vehicle sounds useful, but I can't stress enough that the enemies that don't go down in 1-3 hits are easily defeated by the strafe and shoot strategy. Being able to burst fire, shoot a stronger shot less often, or have an additional status effect on your shot doesn't do anything to change up this strategy. Upgrading outside of required story progression (e.g. needing a new bot to cross over into an area, or needing a specific weapon to break down an obstruction) is wholly unnecessary, and only cuts down on the time you will spend strafing and shooting on the mini bosses.

To put it bluntly, the progression in this game is boring. The vehicle combat (after the allure of shooting a giant gun wears off) is boring. It is wild to me that Thief's whole skill tree exists to cut down on the tedium of non-story combat and resource gathering. Here is a skill that will mine every drop in your local area. Here is a skill that increases the number of drops from enemies so you have to do less tedious grinding to get your preferred weapon. Oh, you have reached a spot in your progression where you have 0 of multiple items? Guess you better get on with the story so that you can get the quest that will allow you to craft that item. You have now leveled up! Here is a skill point for Beelzebub for his on-foot combat that is almost completely useless, and here is one for either of your allies!


This review is long enough, so I will try to keep this brief

• Rework the combat system. It definitely needs either some type of finisher, parry or combo mechanic to make it more interesting though. Weakpoints on large enemies or bosses that can be targeted with enough damage. Some type of ammo burn where you can rapidly dump a full magazine into an enemy that has been staggered. Being able to stagger enemies in a vehicle. Something to break up the strafe and shoot of it all. An incredibly wild take on this would be to have some type of combo system that uses the vehicles for portions of the combo (e.g. ram an enemy with a bike to send them skyward, capsule switch to the jumping bot to launch into the air, switch to car to rocket barrage them before falling onto the enemy with the full force of the tank).
  
• I feel like progression shouldn't be locked to story events. XP across the board should be increased for both combat and side quests. There should be some way to unlock vehicles, weapon upgrades and the like without needing to progress in the story.
  
• Significantly increase the number of generic conversations between Thief, Rao, and Beelzebub, or add an option to disable them completely. Either that, or keep them limited to important events (e.g. picking up a rare item, defeating a tough enemy,or the first visit to a new location).
  
• Remove the animation of entering a vehicle when you press the option to skip the vehicle animation (i.e. keep the skip as fast as switching vehicles when you are already in one)
  
• Have color customization cost either Zeni or be free.

Sand Land is a game that explores a lot of themes, in fact they almost cram too many themes into this package. Themes like prejudice, environmentalism, racism, religion and spirituality, politics, friendship and family relations, war and poverty - and more.

This game is immensely complex if you look past the surface level, which is true of most Akira Toriyama works. But it is also comfortable to anyone who enjoys Toriyama's works. The 'tailed boy who likes challenge and adventure goes on an epic quest' journey to the west, coming of age trope that Toriyama adores in almost everything he does is still here.

It's basically 'Dragon Ball' if Dragon Ball was set in a Post Apocalyptic Mad Max world, a strange - but familiar - alternate reality telling of that story. To some, the fact that it's exploring yet another trope might be 'samey' and 'boring'.

To stupid fanboys like me, we never get tired of the nuances and differences. This game is as awesome as the manga and it's a shame there won't be more.

10/10 Would let blonde dreads Bulma fix my tank again