Sand Land: Halfway point review on PS5
Sand Land was a game that was very easy for me to pick up. I like Anime a normal amount and I like the idea of open-world RPG's provided they don't throw a million commands at me all at once that are easily forgotten (this is why I have never made it very far in RDR2 or Witcher3). The main thing I enjoyed about Sand Land was that it was (and still is) free with a PS Plus account.
I have now spent about 15 hours playing and according to online reports this game is 30 hours for main story or somewhere around there.
here is what I have experienced thus far.
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Unique, cartoonish art style
I grew tired of hyper-realistic looking graphics quite some time ago and while they likely did it this way in order to have a more anime look to it, it also is less taxing on a system than trying to Cyberpunk us. Of course I am playing on console so that is rarely an issue anyway but for PC players, it might be. I don't think Sand Land's graphics are going to be a limiting factor in anyone's ability to play this.
it is whimsical on purpose and that is just fine by me.
Game interrupted by the story far too often
This is just a personal thing: I like a story but not if it takes over control of the play every few minutes
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The story is reasonably entertaining but since there is really only so much that you can do with a cast of 4 primary players (only one of which you directly control) there is a lot of stuff going on such as finding out where someone is and then having a lengthy chat about why they went there and didn't tell anyone etc, gets to be a bit of a grind. I have skipped so much of these at this point and I probably wouldn't do so if they didn't happen so often.
too much senseless running around
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The map is quite large and a lot of the time I can't help feel as though it is this big just so that they could say "hey, look how big our map is!" but the problem is that there isn't really any reason to go to all the places they have listed and the loot payouts for visiting caves is normally for materials that you already have too many of so you stop doing those pretty early on.
For the most part after you complete a certain portion of the quest it will have you backtrack to some earlier visited city and the little yellow indicator that tells you which way to go is pointing somewhere very distant... thankfully you have a fast travel thing that once you open them up, enables you to travel to almost anywhere provided you have been there before. My question though is why not just do this automatically? I get that there might be some people out there that want to 100% an area before leaving but most people aren't going to be interested in that. That small percentage of the gaming world could travel back couldn't they? After the 37th time this happened I kind of started to get annoyed about it, especially when it is telling me to return to a city that I just departed from a little while ago.
Enemies are honestly, too easy
I'm playing the game on normal and everything other than bosses pose exactly zero challenge. If you strafe in a vehicle you are going to win, it's just a question of a few shots while strafing.
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If you see a tank in the distance you just drive to the side and aim your sites out the side of your tank while you aim slightly in front of that tank. They only aim at your current position so if you are moving anywhere except towards them, they are not going to get you. When I stepped up the difficulty to the hard setting this really terrible AI didn't change, it just increased the amount of HP that they had. I mean, it is nice to dominate your opponents if you intentionally XP grinded for that purpose, but there is no need to ever do that in this game.
Bosses are similarly simple to figure out their attack patters because once again, their attacks are based on where you WERE, not what you are driving towards. To make this a bit more difficult the only thing the devs did was put some environmental hazard in your way to attempt to force you to get stuck, which I think is even more annoying than having a boss be super-hard.
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Getting new vehicles is fun
This is the bread and butter of the game. You are always encountering new vehicles by either buying the blueprints and gathering the materials necessary to complete them, or you just randomly get given the blueprints. You can have a loadout of 5-6 vehicles with you at all times thanks to some demi-magic and there are certain situations that will call for certain vehicles although I believe that in most combat situations sticking with the standard battle tank is probably the best DPS.
Regardless, this keeps gameplay quite fresh as it is fun to explore all the vehicles other than the motorbike which to me has terrible controls.
Too much repetitive dialogue
This gripe cannot be visually replicated but will be noticed in game very quickly. When you are cruising around in whatever vehicle you decided to use, the various characters on board will have conversations with one another that I guess is meant to be an amusing way of passing the time since most of the landscape is filled with nothing (pointlessly huge). this is all fine and dandy but the system seems to go through a set of 4-8 various conversation depending on how far you are in the game and it repeats these over and over and over and over and over. Many times I heard the same conversation twice in a row so it must be on some sort of RNG loop since it doesn't seem to get triggered by anything environmental.
This doesn't really help you with any of the gameplay or assist you in getting anywhere for the most part (sometimes it does) and therefore it is just radio static to me. There is also no way to turn it off. Maybe I am being too fussy here.
My overall position on this game remains the same in that it is an extremely easy open-world game that I think almost anyone would have no trouble with. The story is a bit too much but maybe there are some super-anime-fans out there that would appreciate this sort of thing. For me, the graphics and controls are top notch, the story is ok, and the variety of vehicles are a lot of fun. It's just a shame that the combat offers virtually no challenge at all.