This is a game that I likely would not have played had it not been offered for free. It's a cutesy anime RPG that attempts to have open-world elements and it graphically speaking it is pretty good.
You have the opportunity to get a bunch of vehicles that you can swap between at will when walking around and this is the meat and potats of the game. None of the vehicles are terribly difficult to operate and all of their controls are quite similar.
The game is decent but suffers from some very huge flaws, which I will detail here.
Story
This is one that will appeal to some people but for me this is always a tough sell. I do not enjoy having the flow of a game interrupted by cinematics unless they are necessary and important to the flow of the game. Sand Land does honestly, IMO, WAY too many cinematics and most of them really don't have a great impact on the story. There are just a couple that I can recall that if I hadn't watched them, I wouldn't understand what is going on afterwards.
This is a stock standard story of evil power trying to take over the world and rag-tag team of underdogs prevents that. Nothing terribly innovative going on here other than the fact that the demons are working with humans to stop it since they both occupy the same space.
There is supposed to be humor here and perhaps there would be if they didn't interrupt so frequently. To me they went over the top with the story interruptions but I will admit that I am biased because outside of very well done cinematics such as Diablo has done, I am not a fan of the story being too much of the experience in any game that I play.
The story is good in the game, or barring that, passable even though it is a stock-standard storyline that is in almost any game.
Graphics and controls
Both are outstanding. I've mentioned many times that I don't want super realistic looking graphics in my games because outside of Resident Evil games I feel like most studios that focus so much on it looking like real life, end up doing so at the expense of the game actually being fun. Just look at recent Final Fantasy games for an example of that. IMO those games, the more realistic looking they become, the less engaging the overall game ends up actually being.
Because Sand Land is based on an actual anime, the graphics were meant to look like that and they nailed it.
Controls in the game are simple enough that you can pick it up and remember it, but involved enough that there are other moves that are optional that you can build into your rotation if you want to but are in no way obligated to do so. You can play through this entire game without using anything more than the normal attack button.
and that brings me to my next point
Difficulty
I normally always put games on "normal" when I first start them and then adjust them later if I feel the need. In this game you can change the difficulty any time that you want but be warned, if you put the game on Easy you will regret it. It is entirely too easy on easy and on normal it is still too easy. I put the game on hard to see what would change but the only thing that changes is how much damage you take when you are hit and how much damage you output when you strike (and when in any vehicle).
Nothing about the behavior of enemies changes depending on where the difficulty is and this IMO is just lame especially because enemy AI is truly retarded in this game. As has been pointed out by almost anyone that ever reviewed this game on YouTube and elsewhere, the only thing you have to do to defeat literally any enemy in this game is strafe or kite whatever you are fighting and fire away from a distance. All enemies will aim at where you ARE at that moment, never where you are headed. Dodging enemy attacks isn't even remotely difficult. Stepping up the difficulty just means that the fights become more tedious, not more difficult and therefore there isn't any reason to bother to do so.
The only reason to not play it on easy is because you will one-shot every non boss character in the game.
Open world elements
The map is pretty big in this game and at first this is pretty exciting.
Unfortunately as the game goes on you start to just skip all side quests and various caves whose locations are revealed by you simply stumbling upon it, or by purchasing a "treasure map" from these special vendors. Why do you skip them? Well its because the things you find inside these caves (normally it is a cave) are useless crap. You find more than enough of building materials just by doing the regular quests and other things that you find are just a special currency so that you can buy completely optional items at a specialty vendor. Normally these items you can purchase are more treasure maps and well, I've already stated how finding a lootbox somewhere is just nothing to ever get excited about because it is 99% of the time some crap that doesn't really do anything for you.
I think that a lot of this was put in the game simply so they could say that the game is open-world. This game doesn't need to be open world at all and you figure this out rather rapidly as you set out yet again to traverse a very long distance to your next objective that is filled with mostly nothing. Almost all open world fights can be skipped entirely by boosting past on one of your vehicles and just ignoring the enemies and once you have a few hours under your belt, that is exactly what you are going to end up doing.
Town building
I am one of those guys that really enjoys town building in a game but only if doing so actually serves a purpose: Does the town need to defend itself? Does gathering more of a population actually open up new AND USEFUL things for you in the game, or does it just introduce a new building here and there for you to look at once and then never do so again?
Unfortunately for Sand Lang the latter is the case in this one. There is no real reason to even bother with this since it doesn't change the game at all and for the most part it is completely optional. The fact that it was an option was a big part of the reason why I got involved in the game in the first place and this aspect of it was a huge letdown.
Length
I can't say how many hours long this game is, likely somewhere in the neighborhood of 30-50 hours. To me, based on the variety of play, is far too long. Since each area that you go to is essentially the same as the last with combat variation consisting only of territorial reasons why you would use a particular vehicle, you are always going to be using the tank because it does the most damage. There really isn't much reason to ever use the other vehicles unless you have to jump or drive over water. It would simply take more time if you were going to try to do so.
As for fighting in your demon form is concerned, this is so infrequently used (since the vehicles do significantly more damage) that in the few times in the game when you are forced to use the body form, you have forgotten how to. Most of the upgrades in the game are based around upgrading Beelzebub's powers and you just end up never using them because you don't need to.
I think perhaps they had intended for you to use the body powers a great deal more than you end up using them but later in the dev process they discovered by accident that using the vehicles is considerably more fun. Because of this I didn't even bother using my upgrade points on the person/demon forms. There's no reason because outside of think it was 2 fights, you wont ever be fighting hand-to-hand. Those 2 fights are so extremely easy too that being upgraded is not at all essential.
tl;dr
Overall I think this game is decent but there are going to be a severely limited amount of people that think it is a great game overall. It has potential to have been great but I feel as though when the developers were looking at it when it was near completion they started to realize that it was going to be too much work to improve it to a higher standard and then just banked on the anime fanbois getting out there and playing it regardless.
src
A good example of what most of the enormous world is filled with
It is not a great game but it is decent. There are no terrible bugs other than invisible walls being all over the place and the controls are fine. Unfortunately, this game suffers from a very big problem of being extremely repetitive to the point where the only time that combat is even remotely different is when you are fighting a boss and when that happens the bosses aren't really standing any chance of killing you, they just take a really long time because of massive HP pools and evasive tactics.
They did a decent job on this considering the size of the AA studio, but I only completed the game because I had gone too far at one point and couldn't turn back now. In retrospect I wish I had left it alone because almost all of the open world aspects are total trash as are basically all of the optional missions. There is no reason to deck out your vehicles with super accessories because with just the basic upgrades you can easily overcome everything this game has to offer. Making it more difficult by putting it on "hard" simply accomplished making the game more tedious by making you take more damage and deal less damage simultaneously. It changes nothing about the fact that the enemy AI is extremely predictable and basic through the entire game.
I think that this game would be good for a child that has very little grasp of how to play games but for everyone else this is going to lose your interest very rapidly. I look forward to Bandi Namco releases because this game has a lot of elements that could have been great, but overall it simply is a kind of "meh" experience.
This game generally receives 7/10 reviews by the big reviewing folks out there, but I think a lot of that is because they desperately want an anime game to be good, not that this one necessarily is one.