SAND LAND

Toriyama's other world, built faithfully and a little too talkatively

Sand Land began as a manga Akira Toriyama wrote between his more famous Dragon Ball serials, a post-apocalyptic story about a desert world starved of water where a fiend prince, a retired human soldier and a wanted desert bandit team up out of shared necessity rather than any grand alliance. ILCA's video game adaptation, developed under Bandai Namco, keeps that premise and tone largely intact, and it released in April 2024, about two months after Toriyama's death — one of the last projects he was directly and personally involved with, down to a message he wrote to fans ahead of launch. None of that context changes what the game mechanically is, but it's worth knowing going in: this is as close as players will get to a new, finished Toriyama story told with his direct input, and it shows in how carefully the adaptation handles his specific sense of humour and design sensibility.

A genuinely excellent tank workshop wrapped in a talkative open world

The strongest, most consistently praised system in Sand Land is its vehicle customisation. Beelzebub and company build and modify tanks and other vehicles from parts scavenged across the desert, and reviewers across the spectrum — including several who otherwise can't recommend the game — single this system out as a genuine highlight, with real mechanical variety between vehicle builds rather than a cosmetic-only customisation loop. It's the kind of system that rewards the player who likes tinkering for its own sake, independent of how the rest of the game around it holds up.

Combat itself is more mixed. On foot, Beelzebub's moveset lacks a lock-on system, which multiple reviewers flag as a real problem in a 3D action game with enemies that move unpredictably around the player. Vehicle combat fares a little better in reception but still draws a specific, repeated complaint: several detailed reviews describe it as a simple circle-strafe pattern around enemies that doesn't meaningfully change or escalate across the 30-to-40-hour campaign. None of this makes combat bad exactly — it's serviceable enough that most positive reviews don't dwell on it — but it's clearly the vehicle customisation menu doing the game's heavy lifting rather than the fights themselves.

The dialogue problem, and why it dominates the negative reviews

If there's one specific, fixable-sounding issue that towers over everything else in Sand Land's negative review sample, it's the companion dialogue system. The single most-upvoted negative review on Steam opens with an example that dozens of other reviewers independently echo almost word for word: the party encounters an obstacle, a character states the completely obvious solution out loud, the game has already given the player the tool for that solution many hours earlier, and the same or a near-identical line repeats the next time a similar obstacle appears — sometimes within the same play session. Several reviewers describe conversations that trigger automatically every ten to twenty seconds regardless of what's actually happening on screen, with characters narrating simple visual details ("look, a big tree, we can't walk through it") as though the player couldn't see the screen themselves. Making it worse, there's no setting to disable forced subtitles, reduce dialogue frequency, or meaningfully speed through conversations beyond manually clicking past each line — and cutscenes will auto-advance after a fixed delay whether or not the player is ready, which several reviewers find just as irritating as the repetition itself. This is a genuinely unusual thing to see dominate a review base this consistently: it isn't a matter of taste the way pacing or difficulty complaints often are, it's a specific, describable design choice that a large, otherwise-satisfied audience independently identifies as the game's biggest flaw.

Performance issues compound the frustration for some players. Multiple detailed reviews, including from players running high-end hardware, report real frame stuttering specifically during vehicle combat sequences — the moments the game is otherwise selling hardest. At least one reviewer notes the same stutter was present in the pre-release demo months earlier and was never addressed for the retail launch, which is a worse look than a stutter appearing for the first time on release day. The opening hours don't do the game any favours either: one detailed review clocks almost three hours of introduction and tutorial before the player can even open the tank customisation menu for the first time, an unusually long on-ramp for a game whose single best system is exactly that customisation menu, and one that will test the patience of anyone who bought the game specifically for it.

Verdict

SAND LAND is a faithful, visually distinctive adaptation of a Toriyama story that deserved a careful treatment, and on the systems that matter most to that adaptation — art direction, tone, and a genuinely deep vehicle-building system — it delivers exactly what fans wanted. Where it falls short is almost entirely containable to one specific, well-documented problem: a companion dialogue system so repetitive and inflexible that it's the headline complaint across a huge share of an otherwise Very Positive review base, compounded by combat that leans more on vehicle tinkering than tight on-foot design and stuttering that shows up even on strong hardware. None of that erases what the game gets right, and for players who go in knowing what to expect from the dialogue, there's a genuinely charming 30-to-40-hour campaign here — one that carries some extra weight as one of the last stories its creator had a direct hand in telling.