Sand: Raiders Of Sophie
Hologryph · Shooter, Survival, Battle Royale
Overview
In SAND you build your highly customizable walking mech fortress. Squad up or go solo. Scavenge the dunes, gather loot, weapons, priceless artifacts, survive and extract. Clash with other players in a brutal procedurally generated desert set in an alternate 1910.
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Welcome to SAND: Raiders of Sophie. Pilot your custom built war machines across the dunes of a fallen planet, battle rival players, scavenge for loot, weapons, ammo and resources, survive and extract with your spoils in a massive procedurally generated world.
Out here on Sophie, a raider is only as strong as their Trampler. Fully customizable, gigantic walking mechs that shield you from the elements, defend you and your loot from rival scavengers and rain destruction on anything that obstructs your pursuit of becoming the most notorious raider upon the dunes!
Forge your fortress, dominate the desert
Design a modular trampler where your creativity and will to succeed is your only limit.
Build an impenetrable fortress that can weather the deadliest of assaults, a walking war machine stacked with mounted turrets and firepower, something small and stealthy to get you out of trouble as quickly as you get into it or a chaotic jumble of modules to confuse and disorient your enemies.
No matter your playstyle, you can design a trampler to support it.
Squad up or go solo
Get your crew together, or go solo as you embark on expeditions. Deploy into the world, chart your course, and scavenge cities, ruins, shipwrecks and other remnants of a fallen world for loot. Survive encounters with the mysterious supernatural Upiors, fight or talk your way out of confrontations with other players, locate your extract point and escape to the safety of the orbital station with your loot, life and Trampler intact.
PvPvE action
Smoke on the horizon, the groans of the undead echoing through the cities, and the distant rumble of sand all signal danger. Every city looted, shipwreck scoured or ill-timed encounter with other scavengers might just be your last, so keep your wits about you.
There are no friends on Sophie, the only ones you can trust are you and yours.
Choose how you brave the dunes…
Design your Tramplers from scratch in the Trampler Editor before deploying into the world. Test your builds and scavenge lower-tier items at your own pace in Voyage Mode, or raise the stakes in Storm Dive for higher-tier loot and greater rewards, where as sandstorms slowly engulf the region, the risk of confrontations with other scavengers and the loss of your hard earned loot increases.
From the game's Steam store page.
THE GAMEQ VERDICT8,854 reviews analyzed
What players are actually saying
1. Summary
Fans of Sand praise the same core: crewing a walking fortress you designed yourself, spotting a smoke column on the horizon and trading cannon fire with another trampler. A common comparison is Sea of Thieves on land with progression that matters, and the trampler editor, the setting and the sound design also collect praise. The trouble is everything around that core. In the launch weeks reviewers wrote about server crashes and disconnects, some of them wiping loot at extraction. From July the complaints moved to cheaters teleporting into captain's quarters, solo queues that put lone players against full crews, and new players meeting fully upgraded tramplers in their first matches. Collision bugs on ladders and stairs, shaky hit registration and thin PvE come up throughout.
Half the reviews recommend the game, and a common defence in the positive ones is that this is early access and the potential is there. The share of recommendations fell from 59% in launch week to between 41% and 50% through July and 37% in the week of August 3. Over the same weeks server complaints eased while complaints about cheaters, matchmaking and shrinking lobbies grew.
2. What keeps coming up
What players praise
Trampler fights and cannon combatHigh
Reviews that bring up the cannons or trampler-against-trampler fights (13% of the longer ones) tend to describe them in detail: aiming for the reactor, shooting out legs to cripple a fleeing walker, repairing compartments mid-fight and the explosion when an enemy goes down. "First fight is amazing win or lose." One reviewer calls it "Sea of Thieves, but it has non-stop, intense PVP." Several negative reviews make the same exception: "The walker pvp is fun and good but player vs player pvp is buggy". The praise often stops at the trampler itself. A positive review puts it as "I love the trampler part, but I hate the FPS part," and finds walking around and shooting on foot clunky. Some veterans also argue the fights reward ramming, boarding and shields more than gunnery.
Sea of Thieves with stakes and progressionHigh
Sea of Thieves comes up in 11% of the longer reviews, usually alongside Rust, Tarkov, Hunt: Showdown or Guns of Icarus. Fans use the comparison to say that loot matters here because it feeds a tech tree and better tramplers, where Sea of Thieves offers cosmetics. "If you love Sea of Thieves but wished looting and progression actually mattered, this is the game for you." Negative reviews use the comparison too, less kindly: "Sea of thieves had sex with Arc Raiders.... Not good".
Designing your own tramplerMedium
Builders enjoy laying out compartments, hiding the reactor, choosing cannons and seeing every crew arrive in a different machine. "Building your own custom walker and unlocking new compartments and upgrades is amazingly intricate and intuitive." The complaints are about the tools and the limits: a fiddly editor camera and keybinds, building pieces locked deep in the tech tree, no visual customisation, and a meta that rewards tall towers or "the largest blob of crap possible", as one negative review puts it.
Best with a crewMedium
Reviewers who play with friends describe one person driving, one repairing and others on the guns, and say this is where the game works best. Short positive reviews say much the same ("fun with frends", "But it's a great game to play with friends."). This praise often comes with a warning about playing solo.
Setting, atmosphere and soundMedium
Reviewers like the alternate-history desert world, its abandoned towns and shipwrecks, and the tension of watching the horizon for smoke. Sound has its own fans ("The audio team deserves a raise."), though others find the combat music repetitive and the explosions and broken-pipe noises too loud.
Price for what you getMedium
Fans call the price fair for what is already there; reviewers mention paying $20 to $25. Others argue that a game in this state should cost less, or should have stayed a free playtest.
Risk and rewardLow
Some fans single out the tension of deciding whether to push for one more point of interest or head for extraction. "One of the best aspects of the game is how greed can ruin an entire run." Players also like that losing the trampler does not end a run, since you can still steal another one.
Where players are split
Early access as an excuseHigh
Early access comes up in 17% of the longer reviews, and both sides use it. Positive reviews say the bugs are expected, the price is low and the developers are patching, so buy in now. Negative reviews answer that two years of playtests and server slams should have fixed the same problems, and several say the launch build ran worse than the last playtest. Reviewers on both sides say they will change their recommendation once the servers or matchmaking are fixed.
Grind and tech tree paceMedium
Some find the progression rewarding and a real reason to extract. Others call it a slog, particularly solo, and point to costs in the hundreds of materials: "some of the techs would take 100's of hours to get even something as basic as a Shovel or a set of stairs". From July this theme mixes with the gear-gap complaint, because players with a fully unlocked tree are the ones new players meet in their first raids.
PerformanceMedium
Reports on frame rate and stutter disagree. Some reviewers get smooth play on mid-range or older hardware and better frame rates than in the playtests; others report stutter on top-end cards ("RTX 4090 and game stutters like hell."), drops when another trampler comes into view, and a few full PC crashes or reboots. Complaints were heaviest in the launch fortnight (10% of longer reviews then, about 4% to 5% afterwards).
Boarding and stealing tramplersMedium
For some reviewers, taking an enemy trampler is the best moment in the game: "My favorite part of this game is that feeling when your trampler gets destroyed so you hop on the enemy's trampler and capture it there's no better feeling." Others call it broken: defenders respawn faster than attackers can take the wheelhouse, C4 and shotgun boarders take ships "before you can even respawn", and cheaters used capture by teleporting inside. Reviewers mention that capture was switched off for a while; some liked the change ("Game was better when capture was disabled.") while others missed it.
The developers' responseMedium
Fans credit frequent hotfixes and communication on Discord: "If the Devs maintain the rate they are fixing, patching, and improving this game, it is going to be one of the greats." Critics say announced fixes, such as the solo queue fix, did not work, and that updates were pushed mid-match without warning.
What frustrates players
Bugs, collision and getting stuckHigh
"Ladders are this games worst nightmare." Bugs come up in 34% of the longer reviews, and 12% describe getting stuck, mostly on ladders, stairs, railings and small terrain edges. Players describe being thrown off their own moving trampler, falling through the world, invisible doors, shelves and steering consoles on spawn, a looping broken-pipe sound, and crates vanishing into walls. With no unstuck option that keeps your inventory, these bugs are expensive: respawning to get free often drops your gear where you cannot reach it.
CheatersHigh
Cheaters or hackers appear in 32% of the longer reviews, and the share grew after launch: 20% of longer reviews in the launch fortnight, 47% from July 6 to August 2, and 36% after that. The descriptions repeat: players teleporting or flying through closed doors into the captain's quarters, noclipping, aimbots, vacuuming loot, turning off reactors from a distance, and ships with duplicated experimental cannons. One reviewer describes "a flying player to phase through the wall into my captain's quarters to steal our ship". Some reviewers say they have never seen a cheater and that desync gets mistaken for hacking. Several reviews also complain that there is no in-game way to report a player.
Server crashes that wipe loot at extractionHigh
29% of the longer reviews mention servers, disconnects or crashes, and 14% describe losing loot, gear or a whole run. This was the launch-week story (36% of longer reviews in the launch fortnight, about 21% afterwards): DDoS outages, reconnects that hung on a loading screen, and disconnects at or near extraction that threw away the run. "Extraction Looter but extracting doesn't give you the loot you looted". Some players changed their reviews to positive once the servers settled, but reports of extraction failures and characters appearing wiped continued into later months.
New players against fully upgraded tramplersHigh
Starter walkers with grey guns keep meeting tier 3 or tier 4 tramplers with armour, shields and experimental weapons. 14% of the longer reviews describe this gear gap, and the share rose from 9% in the launch fortnight to 18% in July and 23% from August. Reviewers add that heavy tramplers move as fast as light ones, so a small walker cannot escape: "big and heavily-armed walkers can also move as fast as smaller ones, making it meaningless to trade for speed". Reviews from late August onward describe the new gear-based matchmaking as not working or as emptying lobbies: "Gear based matchmaking is also just not working at all."
Solo and small crews against bigger teamsHigh
Crew sizes draw complaints in 13% of the longer reviews. In the first weeks solo queues regularly put lone players against duos, trios and full crews, and later reviews describe solo players openly teaming up in solo lobbies. The brackets themselves are another grievance: duos land against trios and four-player crews against six. "Running into a 6 man crew in a solo lobby is not only unfair and unwinable, but also unacceptable." The theme grew over time, reaching 19.5% of longer reviews from August. Some solo players do say they enjoy the mode, especially in Voyage.
PvE enemiesMedium
Reviewers call the zombie-like enemies janky ("the zombies strafe faster than the flash"), deadly accurate and able to shoot through walls, and say radar towers can keep summoning waves of NPC tramplers. PvE players also ask for a mode without other players, which reviewers say is missing.
Hit registration and desyncMedium
Pistol and shotgun shots that do not land at point blank, cannon shells passing through enemy tramplers and players rubber-banding on moving decks are the usual examples. A minority say hit registration is fine and blame missed shots on aim.
Weapon and build balanceMedium
The battering ram, shotgun cannons, smoke, shields that block all damage, experimental weapons, orbital strikes and C4 boarding all draw balance complaints. Talk of specific weapons and tactics rose from 8.9% of the longer reviews overall to 13% from August, when veterans complained about hollow tower builds and an endgame of experimental gear.
Thin content and no endgameMedium
Some reviewers call the world empty or repetitive, or say there is little to do once the tree is unlocked. "Realistically there is no endgame". They ask for more biomes, quests, world events and PvE variety.
Shrinking lobbiesMedium
Talk of a dead or shrinking player base rose from 3.5% of longer reviews in the launch fortnight to 15.5% from August. Later reviews describe seeing the same players in every match, region merges and missing Oceania servers. "lobbies are dead with new gear based matchmaking."
Extract campingMedium
Players complain about crews waiting at extraction points to rob others at the end of a long run, and some describe being shot while climbing the extraction ladder.
No real tutorialLow
Newer players in particular say the game explains too little: text pop-ups instead of a tutorial, unclear rules about loot needing to be on shelves to extract, and mechanics left for YouTube. "No tutorial, only some useless prompts."
Characters tied to regionsLow
Reviewers describe characters and progress tied to a server region. Some players thought their progress was wiped when the game switched them to another region, and others cannot play with friends elsewhere without starting over. "Remove the region lock. It completely divides the player base".
Anti-cheat kicks for network troubleLow
Some reviewers describe being kicked or banned for "suspicious activity" after lag, a ramming collision or an overlay, and losing the run with it. "If you have any internet issues be prepared for a 24 hour ban".
Going broke with no way backLow
A few losses can leave a character out of materials and money with no free starter kit, and some reviewers say a fresh character was their only way to keep playing. One notes the game "lacks a failsafe for going broke".
No matchmaking with strangersLow
Some reviews ask for a way to fill a crew with random players instead of finding one on Discord. "Not everyone has a squad ready to go every night."
Smaller complaintsLow
A few reviews mention a toxic community, missing female characters and character customisation, keybinds that cannot use mouse buttons, no controller support, and camera motion that causes sickness.
3. The player conversation
The recommendations split almost exactly in half. Some positive reviews exist mainly to push back against the negative ones, and a recurring type of negative review says the reviewer loves the concept and will switch once something is fixed. Much of the disagreement is over whether the technical state and matchmaking let players reach the trampler fights.
The topics changed over time. In launch week, when 59% of reviews were positive, the talk was about outages, extraction disconnects and solo queue bugs, with goodwill toward what reviewers call a small team. By the week of July 6 the positive share had dropped to 44%, fewer reviews were about servers, and cheaters had become the most discussed problem. From August the weekly positive share mostly stayed between 37% and 51% and far fewer reviews were being written, while the complaints shifted toward the gear gap, gear-based matchmaking, teaming in solo lobbies, the meta and shrinking lobbies.
Who raises what also differs. Complaints about the missing tutorial, performance and controls come from reviewers with relatively few hours, some of them writing after a refund. Complaints about cheaters, boarding, teaming, the meta and dead lobbies come from players with dozens of hours or more, several of whom also played the earlier playtests.
4. What the developers could do
- Make extraction safe from disconnects. 29% of the longer reviews mention server problems and 14% describe losing loot, including disconnects at extraction that cost a long run.
- Act on cheaters inside the game. 32% of the longer reviews mention cheaters, with the same reports of teleporting into captain's quarters and remote reactor shutdowns, and players ask for server-side checks and a report button.
- Keep crew sizes apart in matchmaking. 13% of the longer reviews describe solos meeting teams and duos meeting trios, and players ask for a true solo queue, a duo bracket and closer crew sizes.
- Close the gap between new and upgraded tramplers. 14% of the longer reviews describe starter walkers meeting tier 4 builds, and reviewers ask for matchmaking that works and for lighter tramplers to be faster than heavy ones.
- Fix ladders, stairs and collision, and add an unstuck option that keeps your gear. 12% of the longer reviews describe getting stuck, and a forced respawn often costs the inventory.
- Improve hit registration on moving tramplers. Reviewers describe shots and shells passing through targets, which undercuts boarding and on-foot fights.
- Give new players a tutorial and a safety net. Reviewers ask for a real tutorial, a free basic rig or loadout so a broke character is not stuck, and characters that are not locked to one region.
- Stop kicking players for network spikes. Players with lag or a hard collision report "suspicious activity" kicks and day bans that cost them the run.
