SAND: Raiders of Sophie Review: A Great Foundation, but Still Too Rough

A unique extraction shooter held back by cheaters and gameplay issues

SAND: Raiders of Sophie is a unique extraction shooter where you can customize your own mech to raid for loot and treasure on a distant planet in an alternate 1910, but gameplay issues and cheaters hinder its premise.

SAND feels like something that I’ve always wanted to play. It’s like a steampunk Sea of Thieves, where you take control of a mech landship in a strange new land to find treasure and equipment that you can take back to your fully customizable mech.

You can unlock new parts, better weapons, and more to turn your dinky old rust bucket into a fully armored behemoth. It hits a specific part of my brain that craves both creative freedom for what I can create and the adventure I want to go on.

Unfortunately, SAND sits at Mixed reviews on Steam at the time of writing due to multiple issues that prevent players from enjoying what the game has to offer. With a rampant cheater problem, unbalanced fights, and a general lack of things to do, SAND is not in a good place and falls short of expectations.

Reviewed on PC during Early Access.Score: 3/10

SAND: Raiders of Sophie Gameplay Reveal Trailer

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The Good: Being the captain of my own vessel

At times, this game feels perfect. You can choose between playing in a team of up to six people or playing by yourself across the two game modes.

Storm Dive is a battle royale-like mode that uses a storm that closes into a circle, forcing players in their mechs to battle each other while racing against the clock to collect as much loot as they can.

This is a chaotic mode, and it gave me a rush as I watched three behemoths blow each other to bits while I steered myself out of the way, hoping to exfil. Then I found someone else with the same idea, and we had a chase as we battled it out across the massive dunes surrounding us.

It can be a little much at times, especially when you are someone new to the game, like I was, and your first introduction is a shotgun cannon blowing you to bits as someone wipes the floor with your mech.

That’s why I mostly played Voyage Mode, a persistent server where there was no time limit, players could come in at any time, and it felt oddly peaceful.

Even with the occasional chase and eventual loss, the sound of my mech creaking as it powered through the sands toward a point of interest, along with the smoke plume from the engine covering the sky, made it feel like I was the captain of my own ship.

Stopping to grab some loot from an old ship or maneuvering my mech to avoid the NPC enemies, without the fear that someone could appear on the horizon and hunt me down, was a nice change of pace. It gave me time to truly appreciate the adventure the game had to offer.

The best thing about this game, though, is the mech building. You get a chassis with legs that you can place all the pieces of your ship on.

There are mounts for your turrets, captain rooms where someone can take control of your ship, crew rooms to respawn in, and more. All of these pieces can be slapped together in a utilitarian way to arm your ship however you need.

I mostly increased the number of shelves on my ship to hold my loot. SAND even has a massive tech tree where you can unlock new weapons for your character, new parts for your ship, and even new chassis, so you can slowly create a beast for the sands of SAND.

I salivated at the idea of my own personal armored walker, designed for a run-and-gun style, but I would have to play for a long time to even get there.

The Bad: An invincible man, a teleporter, and a lot of wasted time

One of the biggest complaints from the SAND fanbase at the moment is the massive cheater problem.

From what I saw, the most common comments were from people who loved the game but couldn’t recommend it, or even review it positively, because cheaters seemed to flourish under the lax anti-cheat system.

Luckily, I only experienced this problem twice.

The first was a man who gave me chase. He seemed to have the same terrible starting ship as mine, so I lobbed a couple of 80mm rounds his way.

After enough time shooting at his ship while he shot at me, I eventually tried a daring strategy. I jumped onto his ship and tried to gun him down.

That’s when I put a few rounds of buckshot into him, and he stood still, letting me shoot him with my sidearm before I realized what was happening.

He gunned me down, shot at my ship while it was undefended, and when I got back, I tried to run, to no avail. About an hour was wasted.

This led to a funny realization. If you go out on a voyage with all the energy cells that power your engine and then lose them during that voyage, you don’t have any energy to power your ship for the next one.

I ended up deleting that character save to get new energy cells for a new ship. Luckily, I didn’t have much on that character, but that was about two hours gone in total.

I then had a separate issue with someone who seemingly teleported to me, blew me down, and continued to do so until I ran out of respawns for my ship.

Again, another hour and another character gone. I didn’t learn my lesson the first time.

Even though I didn’t experience it as much as other players say they have, it’s a frustrating waste of time to lose progress to someone whose only goal with their free time seems to be wasting yours.

Luckily, there was a huge ban wave against cheaters on July 25, but players were still reporting problems with cheaters in the game at the time of writing.

The Ugly: David versus Goliath

Now, I will say, in all fairness, that I am terrible at extraction shooters outside of Sea of Thieves.

When I play Dark and Darker, I usually get put down easily by the first barbarian or fighter who chooses to end my life.

In Marathon, I can put up a better fight since I’m more of an FPS guy, but I still die to some dude with a shotgun.

In Escape from Tarkov, I just don’t know how the hell to stay safe except by hiding.

My problem with SAND is that I don’t think I’ve had a fair fight once.

As I said in the good section, I love the chases in this game. It feels cinematic to be on my cannon lobbing shots while their cannon rounds whiz by my head.

The issue is that they have better guns.

The tech tree I gushed about is extensive and requires hours of grinding. When I have nothing but the starting equipment and someone rushes me with higher-tier weapons, I can put a few rounds into them without making a dent, while they take me down in half that time.

The one time I did win was through sheer willpower. I had to fire my guns, repair broken parts, reload, fire, and then continue the cycle. The other person just didn’t do that, so I won.

If I want to take on other people with better weapons, I have to grind the skill tree.

When I try to take on larger, more rewarding targets, like forts and towns, I run the risk of someone staking out that location, ready to blow up my hard work while I’m still fighting the NPCs.

The safest option I found was to make short runs where I collected low-level loot from the randomly placed old ships, extracted with my scraps, and sold them.

Spending two hours doing that was like pulling teeth with your fingers, and I just wanted to give up.

I had no fun trying to bang out some of the basic trees, and unless you spend tens of hours playing, you fall behind everyone else.

It just feels terrible, especially when you see the fun new parts on other people’s ships and know you don’t have the time or the will to grind for them.

The Frustrating: Finding out what is wrong

As I went through the issues with the game, the grinding, getting blown up, and everything else, I wanted to know if I was the problem.

Why was it that the longer I played, the less fun I had? Was I just bad at the game?

I was bad at it, but I love games I’m still bad at. So I went through a journey with other games to find out what the issue was.

Going back to Dark and Darker, both games have similar issues with players who no-life the game, outskill you, and outlevel you. Instead of feeling exhausted with Dark and Darker, however, I had a ton of fun.

The simple gameplay loop is similar to SAND too: going on a quest, picking up loot, trying to stay out of the way of geared-up players, and taking on NPC enemies to get better loot.

But the stuff you get in Dark and Darker has a lot more variety. It could be gold to sell or slightly better gear, but the variety of things you can find, how you manage your inventory, and the exciting tangibility of finding your favorite weapon at a higher tier make it feel so much better.

In SAND, you get a lot of the same things: ammo and the same weapons over and over again. Instead of finding something immediately helpful, you have to hope you extract so you can level up your tech tree.

Dark and Darker also has that issue to some extent, especially when you need five potions to give to some quest giver, but the small in-game upgrades help alleviate the pain of losing those potions.

You know the next run is the one where you’re going back in to gear up.

Another thing that bugged me was the lack of things to do in SAND.

Yes, you can risk raiding a town or fort, but it’s usually the same stagnant locations over and over again, which adds to the monotony of the game.

Looking at something like Sea of Thieves is not the fairest comparison because it is a AAA game, but it has a large variety of quests with different variations that break up the experience of seeing the same 12 chests over and over again.

Again, in Dark and Darker, despite most enemy encounters being in static locations like those in SAND, there is greater enemy variety, boss locations, and an optional hell arena.

You can risk your items there and hunt for greater rewards while still feeling rewarded because you know you are fighting harder enemies.

In SAND, it’s usually the same enemies, just with more of them as your challenge.

In my opinion, SAND just doesn’t have the variety to make the world feel rewarding when you’re risking your progress.

Final Thoughts

There are other issues. I experienced enemies getting stuck in objects and becoming unhittable while they could still shoot me just fine, framerate issues, animations breaking, and other smaller things that I can handwave as Early Access problems.

SAND has a great foundation, and I wish I loved it more because I can see how this game could be super fun, especially with a group of dedicated friends who wouldn’t mind grinding for a few hours.

I just didn’t like it.

Too many things pushed me away from the game, and I couldn’t recommend it to anyone in the state it’s in.

For now, SAND: Raiders of Sophie is a 3/10.

SAND: Raiders of Sophie

Release: June 22, 2026 — Early Access

Genre: Action, Adventure, Extraction Shooter, Vehicular Combat

Developer / Publisher: Hologryph, TowerHaus / tinyBuild

Platforms: PC — Steam

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