SAND: Raiders of Sophie is set on a fallen desert-like planet named Sophie. As a scavenger, you, along with your custom-built war machine—referred to in the game as a Trampler—set off on expeditions to the planet in order to get your hands on a variety of resources. These can range from new weapons and ammo to raw materials that can be used to build out your Trampler, and even entire cannons that can then be bolted on to your machine. As is the case with many other games in the genre, your efforts to find loot are made more complicated by the presence of other players in the same map.

While SAND doesn’t really stray much from genre conventions when it comes to its overall structure, the presence of the Trampler introduces a massive wrinkle to the gameplay loop. The Trampler is a loud, bulky machine, and leaving the main engine on constantly emits a black smoke that can be seen by just about anyone that cares to look over at the horizon with their binoculars. This means that players that want to avoid encounters with other players will have to jump through a few hoops to remain hidden, like constantly switching their engines off if they suspect someone’s nearby.

Conceptually, the Trampler feels like a phenomenal idea, and it even ends up giving SAND similar vibes to Sea of Thieves. Since it’s fairly large, it’s difficult to handle the entire thing as a single player. This means that bringing along friends is outright encouraged by the game. This way, all players in a group can take on individual responsibility, from using, maintaining, and reloading weapons, to figuring out navigation, and even driving the Trampler itself. If you can find someone to join you on your expedition, SAND: Raiders of Sophie can end up being a lot of fun.

However, on the flipside, this is where one of its biggest issues becomes clear; SAND simply isn’t built for solo players. Sure, there might be a matchmaking option for it, and with enough time and energy, you can certainly build yourself a solo-able Trampler that doesn’t need you to run around as often for simple maintenance tasks. However, doing so requires more resources than you start out with, which means that you’ll have to head into at least a couple of expeditions with Tramplers that are designed around 3 or more players running around.

The Tramplers are clearly meant to be the core feature that the rest of SAND: Raiders of Sophie has been built around. The menu where you can build out your own Trampler is quite detailed and gives you plenty of options for how and where you might want to place certain components. However, players that don’t find much joy in customizing their machines and would rather just take one of the pre-built Tramplers and jump into a mission might want to look elsewhere. While there are a few Tramplers readily available for your early expeditions, the game feels like it has been designed around the idea that you will be making constant tweaks and adjustments to your machine between expeditions to better match your playing style.

Speaking of expeditions, the ones in SAND: Raiders of Sophie tend to be quite long. Even the very first one I did took almost an entire hour, and while there is an element of exhilaration that can be found when you narrowly manage to extract from the map with plenty of spoils, the general gameplay pacing for SAND doesn’t really support this idea much.

Since Tramplers are theoretically able to cover incredible distances in a short amount of time, especially if you get some engine upgrades, the map in SAND is quite huge. However, vast stretches of this map don’t really have anything interesting. Sure, you might get lucky while traveling between various points of interest and maybe spot a PvP battle taking place in the distance, or you might even find yourself entering one. However, these moments tend to be few and far between. Much of your time is going to be spent either staring at the horizon, looking around with your binoculars to try and spot anything interesting, or staring at a map.

Visually, the mech-based extraction shooter is a mixed bag. While there are certainly some gorgeous visuals to be found, especially with the gigantic planet Jupiter occupying much of the northern skybox, the developers’ decision to make Sophie a desert planet might come back to haunt them later on. There simply isn’t much in the way of variety in the game’s environments, and over the span of a run or two, I came away with the feeling that “if you’ve seen one sand location, you’ve seen them all.”

Polish is also quite lacking across a variety of aspects in SAND, from visuals to gameplay. On the visual side of things, the standard AI enemies you fight, called Upiórs, have janky animations that don’t really evoke the creepiness that a zombie should as much as they just feel shoddy in general. Even on-foot navigation can often feel difficult since you can never really tell whether any given ledge is low enough to jump to. On the gameplay side of things, the weapons never really felt good to shoot, and SAND: Raiders of Sophie even did a poor job of letting me know just how wide the recoil on my guns would be.

Several other issues also popped up quite often. The biggest of these that I noticed was the lack of consistency behind fall damage. I spent much of my time with the game thinking that fall damage doesn’t really exist, since I was able to freely jump off my Trampler, and could even leap off a fort I found. However, one tower was seemingly just too high for me to do this, resulting in a quick and shocking death, since this was the only instance of fall damage I had faced in the game. As for smaller instances of a lack of polish, I could see through the seams of some buildings, and even faced Upiórs that were stuck in the texture of a door in their attempts to get at me.

It is worth noting that SAND: Raiders of Sophie is an Early Access title, and the developers have plenty of content planned for future updates. For the time being, however, the extraction shooter feels shockingly dull, despite its excellent idea of incorporating hulking mechs. Between the technical jank and general lack of polish, the in-game map also suffers from an utter lack of any interesting sights or activities. While piloting a Trampler initially sounds like a good time, the lack of content makes this a difficult game to recommend in its current state.

This game was reviewed on PC.