Sand: The First Preview

If stomping your way across the desert on a giant, leggy, weaponized platform with a few of your best friends sounds like a good time, have I got a game for you. Especially if along the way you want to explore a ruined world, scavenge wrecks and ruins, take pot shots at other scavengers, and get in a few knock-down drag-out landship brawls with hostile crews with their own custom-built Trampler mechs.

That’s just what goes down in Sand, an upcoming PvPvE survival shooter where you and your crew want to get down to the planet Sophie, get the goods while exploring the surface, and get out—hopefully making a profit in the process. The world is an alternate history before World War 1, so your gear and the world is all this riveted industrial stuff from the age of iron-clad dreadnoughts, old western revolver-rifles, trousers with suspenders, and some absolutely legendary facial hair. I was able to sit down and try a PvP only test build of Sand with some of the developers, showing off a game that has a clear design vision I think will really resonate with some gamers.

Taking a bold note from more crafting-heavy games like Rust, or from or map-based games like Sea of Thieves, Sand has a slower pace of events. Your Trampler can be pretty fast, depending on how you outfit it, but it still moves and turns like a great stomping ship. Spotting enemies in the distance by their smoke plume is one thing, but your pilot has to do a good job maneuvering and it always helps to have a navigator plotting the course. That’s not to mention your real purpose for hitting the surface: loot.

Shipwrecks and island towns litter the once-wet surface of planet Sophie, any of which could have the find that lets you strike it rich. Or the ammo and power cores that keep your ship going for another round of searches. Or the weapons and gear that outfit your crew for a boarding action against another ship that was more successful in finding riches.

To get all that done you have to take a more methodical approach, and the controls reflect that. You can carry very little loot on your person before you need to find a container to hold it in instead, for example. You always have to aim before firing a weapon, which I found really helped differentiate the size and purpose difference between the pistol, revolver-rifle, and sniper rifle I found on the surface. (I found shotgun shells too…but no shotgun.)

Trampler battles are also slower-paced. It’s a challenge just lining up targets as the gait of your mech throws off aim and the rolling dunes present a constant challenge in just getting a good line of sight. Other Tramplers take a lot of hits from a cannon to go down, requiring you to destroy their engine room for real takedown—which depending on how good a shot you are might take more shells than you brought with you or found on the surface. But it’s either that or board the enemy Trampler, kill the crew, and capture their helm to make it your own.

With that much work and risk in a Trampler-on-Trampler brawl, you need to be sure it’s worth it—because there’s a real sting in spending ten or fifteen minutes chasing someone down to realize they just didn’t have anything worth stealing. Not to mention the circumstance I can foresee players dreading the most: when a fight starts and the other salvage crews start circling like vultures to pick off whoever survives. That’s a scenario I saw more than once through my binoculars.

Not for my crew, though! We had a giant Trampler to stomp around in, a ramshackle monster that the developers assured me was not something you can build with starting resources. And build it you do. A pretty robust, in-depth system of Trampler design lets you place sleeping compartments, the helm, storage facilities, the engines, decks, more engines, fighting balconies, fighting emplacements, and guns all over these things. You can even do cool stuff like customize where doors and hatches are located to make your ship a maze that enemies will struggle to invade. All of that takes resources you’ve gathered on the planet below and that you’re—at least somewhat—risking when you take down your new steel behemoth for another run.

Which is something I already know I’ll find myself doing whenever I next get my hands on Sand.