When you think of open-world adventure, you usually picture sailing through exotic waters or exploring ancient ruins. But what if the ultimate frontier was built by your own hands? The new first-person base-building extraction shooter, Sand, throws that expectation out the window and delivers a uniquely chaotic experience where ingenuity meets explosive mayhem.
From the moment you launch into the game, you realize this isn’t just about running; it’s about engineering. Forget simply respawning after a hit—here, if your vehicle is destroyed, you must stop and rebuild. The star of the show is the walking base, or trampler, which serves as your mobile fortress across the harsh desert dunes.
Before you can even consider embarking on a mission into outer space, you must prepare your trampler. You snap together modules to construct your base before you can even start preparing for battle. Then comes the engineering challenge: mounting massive weaponry like 40mm and 80mm cannons, installing an engine, and fiddling with giant levers to control your behemoth. It’s a blend of tactical planning and hands-on mechanics reminiscent of driving a colossal spider-mech in a wild adventure.
The gameplay quickly shifts from construction to high-octane piloting. Navigating the environment means constantly scanning the horizon for lootable spots while attempting to manage your heavy machinery. The experience is defined by that thrilling, nervous tension: you must constantly move, scurry across the sand on foot during looting runs, terrified another player’s trampler might stride up and turn your base into scrap.
This feeling of uneasy paranoia echoes the best parts of cooperative survival games, adding a layer of frantic energy to every interaction. When combat erupts, it is pure, glorious chaos. You have to dive into the cockpit, frantically reloading guns, aiming turrets, and desperately repairing damage while ensuring your walking vehicle doesn’t crash into the next obstacle. It is sheer, adrenaline-fueled maneuvering.
The immersion deepens through exceptional audio design. The soundscape is visceral—the groaning of gears, the jangling of cables, and the deafening roar of mounted artillery all contribute to a truly immersive sensation of being a colossal war machine. You don’t just see the action; you feel the weight and fury of your trampler lurching across the landscape.
The threats are multifaceted. Beyond player-built rivals, players must contend with environmental dangers and automated enemies. Ghoul-like NPCs guard valuable loot, while more devastatingly, orbital automatons begin to stamp around the planet, bringing artillery fire from above. This PvE element adds a truly harrowing dimension to the exploration.
The ultimate objective is extraction—a dramatic climax where combat shifts into a desperate race against time. You must navigate to an extraction point, climb a tower, and wait for a ship to descend from orbit. In this moment of vulnerability, you face the enemy’s organized assault as they try to blow your retreat to hell.
While the experience is intensely tense, there is a commendable design choice allowing solo players to join solos-only servers, mitigating the risk of being overwhelmed by larger crews. Sand offers a genuinely unique blend of creative construction, visceral mech combat, and high-stakes extraction, promising an unforgettable adventure for anyone ready to build their own destiny on the shifting sands.
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Credit: PC Gamer
