Sand Land Review

Sand Land is set, perhaps unsurprisingly, in a desert. “No matter where you look, there’s nothing but sand, sand, sand,” one character says. This is not strictly true. There are also people, tanks, army bases, towns hewn from rock, dinosaurs, and an assortment of demons. These, however, are not the enemy. On the contrary, our hero is Beelzebub, a pink-skinned imp who sports a purple cape and a pair of goggles. We see him at the outset, launching a sneak attack on a passing truck. Why? To pilfer its sloshing cargo, a stack of water containers, and distribute the spoils to the needy and the parched.

It’s a Mad Max premise with a Robin Hood brief, but the story grows wider, and weirder, still. Before long, Beelzebub joins forces with Rao, a salty-haired human sheriff; Thief, a gnomish fellow-demon; and Ann, a young woman with a gift for garage-bound tinkering. Their mission: find the Legendary Spring and, in so doing, loosen the rasping grip of the royal household, which controls the supply of water to the general populace. Turn the tap, and power goes down the drain. Sand Land springs from a manga by the late Akira Toriyama, who published the story in Weekly Shōnen Jump, in 2000. Hence the signature Toriyama touches: frowning brows as thick as tarmac, hair like a frozen brushfire, and a plot parcelled into episodic chunks, packed with real darkness, and daubed in adolescent larks.

If you glance at Sand Land, with its thick gloops of cel-shaded colour, and you think you’re in for Saturday-morning cartoon fare, you wouldn’t exactly be wrong. Certainly, no game in which a villain shouts “Now, Insect Man! Attack!” can be said to cater for an audience of solely serious mind. But we do get warring nations, genocide, and weapons of mass destruction. At one point, Beelzebub boasts of his badness, saying, “Why, just yesterday, I stayed up late and went to bed without brushing my teeth!” Later on, as he stands in a deep crater, the scar of an atomic blast, that light-humoured innocence bleeds away on the wind.

If these clashing tones reach any kind of balance, it’s because they are clinched together by the game’s art. The developer, ILCA, takes its cues from Toriyama’s original illustration, with an eye for his etched texture. Look at the tank in which our heroes rumble over the dunes, a pair of angry eyes drawn on the turret, its dusty olive shell darkly nibbed with lines of shadow. It brings to mind Akio Oyabu’s busy designs for Metal Slug – all those machines of war, piled high with heavy detail and bulging under the weight of exaggeration. And there is a touch, too, of Advance Wars to the mood of Beelzebub’s mission; you catch the same blend of the boyish and the toyish, a toon-bright adventure wrapped around a core of conflict and refusing to bruise.

Would that Sand Land could match either of those games in the action stakes. Most of your time is spent tooling about in various vehicles. There is the tank, yes, but also the Jump-Bot, a dead ringer for the contraption that Wallace forged in The Wrong Trousers – and into which Beelzebub plugs himself in order to reach lofty platforms. And there is also the Motorbike, which comes with a curved roof and a shotgun turret as standard. Combat has you zipping around foes and firing on them, like those segments of Batman: Arkham Knight that buckled you down into the Batmobile. Everyone complained about those parts, because you felt less, not more, empowered by the thing; when the hero is already a tank, with his heavy tread and his armour-plated tailoring, why sap his agility and tether him to the earth in a tin can? Here there is less to complain about. True, these battles aren’t much fun, but it isn’t as if they distract you from anything better.

There are barefisted fights, which feel cardboardy and lifeless, a simple matter of lock on, tune out, punch, punch, punch. Then, of course, there is sand, sand, sand. The main quest is made up of missions, and they all too often feel as if they were stalling for time; at various points I spoke to a villager, who needed me to travel to another settlement, speak to someone else, and then schlep back again. I’m sorry, but when your lead character, suffused with devilish powers and clamped into various walking weapons, is performing the function of a fax machine, something has gone awry. When Hideo Kojima asked us to do that, in Death Stranding, he knew to make us think long and hard about the journey – or at least to think long and hard about our shoes, which had to endure the stony harshness of that game’s apocalyptic Lake District.

Sand Land gives us little to think about. The state of its world is blamed on “man’s foolishness and a succession of natural disasters,” and its moral themes are too potted to make a mark, amounting to little more than: Demons may look mean, with their horns and forked tails, but they can actually be quite nice. The structure of the main adventure echoes your own tired search for real sustenance, a slaking gush of good ideas; but the only available oasis, it turns out, is all around you from the start, in the look of the thing. If you are a keen devotee of Toriyama, who passed away last month, then Sand Land will perhaps be a must-have. If only it weren’t so sparse in its mechanics and trickling in its pace. Its vision may spring from a legendary source, but it will leave you thirsty.