I wanted to love this game.
The concept is fantastic, the atmosphere is unique, and when everything works, SAND can be incredibly fun. That's exactly why I have 94 hours in it. I didn't keep playing because I thought the game was perfect—I kept playing because I genuinely believed each update would fix the problems that were ruining the experience.
Instead, I've reached the point where I can't recommend it.
The biggest issue for me has been cheating and the systems meant to stop it.
Even after the anti-cheat update, I continued running into players doing things that shouldn't have been possible. What's even more frustrating is that the anti-cheat has, in my experience, also punished legitimate players.
One of the worst experiences I had was after destroying another player's Trampler. The destroyed Trampler bugged into the ground. When I interacted with it, the game's anti-cheat suddenly flagged me for "suspicious activity" and removed me from the server. I wasn't cheating. I simply interacted with a bugged object that the game itself created.
I wasn't permanently banned, but the only way to continue playing was to abandon my expedition. That meant losing hours of progress and well over 100,000 Crowns worth of loot because of a bug completely outside of my control. Experiences like that make you question why you should invest time into another expedition if everything can disappear because the game mistakes you for a cheater.
Unfortunately, that wasn't an isolated incident.
Server instability has been another major problem. I've had expeditions end because of freezes, disconnects, or extraction failures. Sometimes you'll reach extraction, see a connection warning appear, and then get kicked from the game, losing everything you spent the last hour collecting. There's nothing more discouraging than surviving a difficult run only to lose it all because the server failed.
Ironically, after the recent update, many parts of the game actually feel more buggy than before.
I've personally experienced:
Loot containers that sometimes won't spawn loot unless I crouch before interacting with them.
More unreliable extraction sequences.
Ladders becoming inconsistent, making climbing on and off Tramplers feel awkward or broken.
General interaction bugs that seem worse than they were before the update.
More technical issues than I remember having prior to the patch.
The game has enormous potential, and that's honestly what makes this so disappointing. I wanted it to succeed. I kept giving it another chance after every update because I thought these issues would eventually be resolved.
These also don't appear to be issues unique to me. The official Discord is filled with players reporting many of the same bugs, false anti-cheat detections, Trampler problems, server instability, and extraction issues. Even the official support bot acknowledges several of these as known issues that are still being worked on.
After 94 hours, I don't feel like I spent that time enjoying the game as much as I spent it hoping the next update would finally fix it.
I hope the developers succeed because the foundation is genuinely great. But in its current state, I cannot recommend purchasing this game. Until the cheating is better controlled, the false anti-cheat detections are resolved, and players stop losing hours of progress to bugs and server issues, I don't think it's worth the frustration.
