| SAND: Raiders of Sophie | |||
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| Release Date | Gameplay & Story | Pre-Order & DLC | Early Access Review |
SAND: Raiders of Sophie is a PvPvE extraction shooter taking place in the sand-swept planet of Sophie where treasures await. Learn more about the game’s plot, gameplay, release date, our review of the game, and more.
Everything We Know About SAND: Raiders of Sophie
SAND: Raiders of Sophie Plot
SAND: Raiders of Sophie has no story mode, but it takes place in an alternate 1910, where humanity is in a gold rush to plunder as many treasures as possible on the planet Sophie, a harsh land teeming with enveloping sandstorms, undead hordes, and hostile players all competing for glory and riches.
Using their custom-made machines called Tramplers, they brave the dangerous dunes.
SAND: Raiders of Sophie Gameplay
The gameplay in SAND: Raiders of Sophie is a first-person extraction shooter with PvPvE elements. Players can encounter hostile AI enemies throughout its procedurally generated world and real players who are also trying to steal the planet’s resources.
The main objective is to collect as many resources as possible and escape before land is engulfed by a raging sandstorm. These resources can then be used to upgrade their base, improve their Tramplers, and craft better gear.
Combat involves traditional first-person shooter mechanics like aiming and shooting, but there is also vehicle warfare in the form of Tramplers, the quadrupedal machines players use to explore the shifting sands. Players can attach makeshift cannons to destroy enemy Tramplers or send smoke signals to communicate.
SAND: Raiders of Sophie Release Date
SAND: Raiders of Sophie was released in Steam Early Access on June 23, 2026 and will be available to PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S at a later date.
SAND: Raiders of Sophie Review [Early Access] | Boundless Yet Bare
The Lone and Level Sands of Planet Sophie
Extraction shooters have slowly made their mark on the gaming landscape thanks to their bite-sized sessions, where players can simply drop in and drop out in a span of 15 minutes to an hour. Like a battle royale on steroids, the major difference from the other genres is the level of risk involved in bringing your favorite gear into the battlefield, knowing it could all be stolen by another player if you fail to extract.
Before games like Embark’s ARC Raiders helped push the genre into the mainstream, it was largely reserved for hardcore players, with titles like Escape from Tarkov leading the space. Now, the genre has reached a more casual audience, inviting curious players to experience its endless cycle of looting, escaping, losing everything, and looting again. Like the nature of life, extraction shooters found new audiences in its addictive feedback loop.
Among the limited pool of extraction shooters, Hologryph and TowerHaus’ SAND: Raiders of Sophie enter the competition. Their own take on the once-niche genre puts players onto a sand-swept planet filled with hostile undead and terrifying sandstorms that give Dune’s Arrakis a run for its money.
Unlike other extraction shooters, SAND does not feature a story campaign or character-driven narrative to immerse players in its world. There are occasional side contracts during a run, but beyond that, the experience is largely driven by environmental storytelling, featuring a planet bled dry of its resources with sunken ships, ruined fortresses, and remnants of lost civilizations. You play as your own custom-made character, sent into the planet Sophie and left to your own devices, hoping to survive and secure the best possible loot.
While SAND retains the familiar extraction shooter loop of dropping in, looting, and escaping, its most fascinating addition is a quadrupedal mecha-powered mobile base of operations that changes how the genre is meant to be played.
Look On My Works, Ye Mighty and Despair
SAND: Raiders of Sophie's defining gameplay feature is its Trampler system. These are massive mechanical walkers that players use to traverse the planet. Inside a Trampler, you are equipped with a captain’s quarters, a generator that powers the machine, and several storage rooms where you can stash all the hard-earned loot you recover from the planet.
These Tramplers essentially act as your safe haven from the terrors outside. They are the foundation that sets SAND apart from its peers, serving as the game’s beating heart and the reason for all our looting. While games like Marathon focus on upgrading gear and improving character stats, SAND is all about your mobile base of operations. You cannot enter an Expedition without a Trampler, shifting the focus away from managing your player character’s strengths and weaknesses before every run and instead centering it on that massive metallic hunk of machinery you call home.
I like to think of the Tramplers as a backpack you bring, like in any other extraction shooters. The difference is that this one is enormous, heavily armored, and packed with naval cannons primed for firing. On a much simpler analogy, the Tramplers are your main tool for surviving the planet’s myriad threats aside from your standard rifles and pistols.
These quadrupedal machines are easily one of my favorite things in the game so far. The sheer aura you exude as you move across the sands in your armored monster feels like piloting an EVA unit a la Neon Genesis Evangelion. But the smooth sailing was not without its issues. Much of my early time was spent reading through the tutorial due to the game’s lack of onboarding.
Controlling these Tramplers functions similarly to the rigidity of traditional tank controls seen in classic Resident Evil games. Movement is directional rather than fully omnidirectional, and I had a few early accidents where I bumped into nearby stone pillars and nearly blew up my Trampler.
It takes a while to get the hang of it, but there is a certain appeal to mastering its controls, especially during hectic battles against other players where you have to carefully position yourself and turn at just the right angles to line up the perfect cannon shot. It's a completely intentional design choice by the developers, as it echoes the same sense of mechanical realism found in games that inspired it, such as Sea of Thieves and, to a lesser extent, Ubisoft's Skull and Bones. Once you get past that initial learning curve, the controls become far more manageable, bringing you one step closer to becoming a true scourge of the sands.
One of the best things about these Tramplers is that they are highly customizable, adding an extra layer to SAND’s core extraction shooter gameplay loop. Whatever items you find across the sands of Sophie can be used to upgrade your Trampler’s design via its tech tree, which adds new blueprints such as additional floors, a shield barrier, and other upgrades that give you all the motivation you need to scavenge the planet dry.
Of course, getting the best loot requires fully engaging with the extraction shooter loop itself, meaning you must successfully escape the planet before being swallowed by the encroaching sandstorm. If you fail, that obviously means losing all your hard-earned loot in one go like a modern-day Ozymandias.
Within the game’s first few minutes, I was immediately thrown into the planet and left hoping I would quickly figure out its controls and objectives. I can already see that its lack of a good tutorial makes it difficult for new players to the genre, especially those unfamiliar with its mechanics. I was simply lucky enough to already know how the dance works.
My first run wasn't all that memorable, as I was still learning the whozits and whatsits of its control scheme, but it quickly taught me a few important lessons, chief among them that my Trampler was just as essential as my own life. Through trial and error, I learned that I could keep respawning back at my Trampler after every death. However, if my captain's quarters get destroyed by an enemy, you lose that luxury of a second chance, leaving your lifeless corpse stranded in the desert. From that point on, I became curious to see just how much of SAND's combat relied on this kind of player discovery.
The Hands That Mock You
SAND currently has two gameplay modes: one for the standard extraction shooter format called Storm Dive, where dedicated solo players are pitted against 14 others in an open-world that’s slowly consumed by a sandstorm like a Fortnite lobby; and another, a purely chill PvE experience called Voyage Mode, where you can loot without worrying about other players, but you are only able to find low-level gear. The latter is essentially the game’s way of letting players recover after a disastrous run, allowing those who have lost everything to start over, albeit in a more limited way.
Storm Dive is where most of the magic happens. These are lengthy sessions that can last anywhere from an hour to two, depending on how early you extract or how unlucky you get with the many threats lurking in the sands.
While exploring the planet’s tricky terrain, you will occasionally encounter a variety of hostile AI enemies. One example is the undead, who carry their own brand of firepower and are more than capable of ruining your day. They are especially dangerous in large numbers, and entering a point of interest without a weapon is practically a death sentence.
Things can also get worse when enemies call forth their own Tramplers from the skies, unleashing a barrage of rockets at your small sanctuary and turning encounters into cinematic tank warfare. At that point, the game practically demands that you fight back and push through the hail of bullets if you want any chance of claiming the treasures they are guarding.
Beyond these two enemy types, there is not much variety to encounter apart from other players piloting their custom-made bastions of steel. I do wish there were more Sandworms roaming the world, as the only one I came across was stuck burrowed in the ground and did little more than being a pushover. More creatures like that could go a long way in making Sophie’s ecosystem feel even more dangerous and unpredictable.
I spent most of my runs dropping onto the planet and grabbing everything I could get my hands on. There is an incredibly addictive gameplay loop where I find an empty crate, fill it with treasures, and haul it back to my Trampler. These mundane moments, paired with the game’s dynamic PvPvE elements, work surprisingly well together. One minute you are peacefully scavenging through ruins, and the next you are scrambling to survive an unexpected encounter with a player who just happened to be parked nearby. You can never really predict what is going to happen next if you are not paying attention.
The rules of engagement in SAND are simple: shoot first, ask questions later. This kind of mutually assured destruction has always been a defining philosophy of extraction shooters. SAND does not waste time as enemy players throw you into explosive firefights using cannons, turning a simple looting expedition into something straight out of Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag’s naval battles, but across endless sands.
The game does a great job of building tension before these encounters as well, as you can spot other Raiders in the distance by the black, billowing smoke from their Trampler’s generators, which reveals their location even from miles away. This gives you a brief moment of awareness of where the other Raiders are, and if you do see one coming straight toward you, you’d best be prepared.
These "Sand Warfares," as I like to call them, are pretty much what you can expect in SAND: Raiders of Sophie. You are not the only Raider scouring these lands; other players are also carving out their own routes in search of valuable loot, often heading toward the same points of interest you have your eyes on.
Some are surprisingly friendly, like that one player who dropped a crate full of canned food beside my Trampler as a peace offering. Others are bloodthirsty Raiders who carry the same fury as Davy Jones himself, eager to sink anyone unfortunate enough to cross their path. In the end, it all comes down to luck and who you happen to encounter out in the sands.
There was one memorable moment that made me audibly say, “Wait, I can do that?” when I encountered another player and managed to steal his entire Trampler while he was busy pilfering mine. After overriding the master controls of his beloved machine, I became its sole owner. Whenever he killed me, I kept respawning back inside his ship, and he's as dumbfounded as I am.
It was only when I took a grenade from his storage refrigerator and threw it at him that he completely disappeared from the game since he no longer had a base to respawn into. I was not entirely sure if it was a fair fight or not, but it did introduce me to how you can be clever in a game like this. I even found myself thinking that this is probably even more exciting when played with friends. I felt a bit bad for that player, though I imagine he was able to recover his losses in a few runs, hopefully.
That encounter alone was one of the major highlights of my first few hours on SANDS: Raiders of Sophie, and I still find myself itching to experience that same kind of thrill again in succeeding runs. But the more I play the game, the more its cracks begin to show.
Round the Decay of Colossal Wrecks
My previous sentiment comes entirely from my experience as a solo player. Right now, there is an inherent issue that may intimidate newcomers: SAND can feel overwhelming when played alone. The game’s systems, combat encounters, and resource management are much easier to navigate with a group, making multiplayer feel less like an optional feature and more like the way SAND was designed to be played.
The game supports up to six players inside one Trampler, with one captain leading the operation and the others just doing whatever they want. If you’ve played games like Sea of Thieves before, it follows a similar structure, where camaraderie makes the adventure significantly easier.
But when played alone, everything gradually slips into tedium the more sessions you put in. Encountering an aggressive player with no real means of fighting back can be frustrating, and raiding a heavily fortified stronghold by yourself rarely feels rewarding. After every encounter, I found myself thinking that this would be far more enjoyable with a group of friends.
Then again, I cannot complain too much, as doing things alone has always been part of the extraction shooter formula, where self-preservation and player greed have long been at the heart of the experience.
On the plus side, there is a surprisingly wholesome social aspect to the multiplayer, which is something I deeply appreciate about SAND. Multiplayer is a completely different beast depending on how you carve your experience, especially when your Trampler is packed with friends you know all too well. You can assign someone to check the map from time to time, have another player man the cannons, or let someone act as a lookout while you use binoculars to scout the planet’s major points of interest.
SAND knows there is a lot of fun to be had with a group of friends, and its Trampler customization options reflect that. Many of the upgrades include additional rooms for crewmates, along with multiple cannon emplacements designed for a fully staffed crew. The larger your Trampler becomes, the more it feels like a mobile home built for shared adventures across the sands. And if you can't find a group of friends to play with, SAND has an official Discord server with thousands of members looking for like-minded Raiders to scour the planet for untold treasures.
The possibilities are endless, and the game truly shines when everyone has a role to play. Whether it is coordinating a raid, scrambling to repair a damaged Trampler, or simply chatting while crossing the dunes, SAND creates the kind of shared stories that are difficult to replicate when playing alone.
Boundless Yet Bare
SAND: Raiders of Sophie is not a perfect game. It is still in Early Access, and its early days are currently hampered by persistent server issues that occasionally kick players out of the lobby. It’s not an isolated case either, as many players have taken to Steam to complain about being booted after a successful one-hour run or unexpectedly losing their progress. As of writing, however, the game has already fixed several critical issues, including the DDoS attacks.
In my 10 or so hours venturing through the planet Sophie, I've had a few successful expeditions, and I still want to do it all over again because the world is just so immersive, and its Trampler system creates some genuinely dynamic moments within its PvPvE mechanics. However, there are still too many bugs and glitches that detract from an otherwise addictive gameplay loop. One example was my character no-clipping through the floor, causing me to fail an extraction as the storm swallowed my poor Raider whole. Other issues stemmed from latency problems that made firefights unreliable, with shots not registering as intended, as well as occasional collision issues when maneuvering my character.
For $24.99, there’s simply too much at risk for players who just want to try this fresh take on the extraction shooter formula. While these technical issues can still be addressed in future updates, the current level of jank is difficult to ignore, and it risks discouraging new players from fully engaging with the game’s systems. In some cases, it may even lead to refunds out of sheer frustration.
That said, there is a solid foundation beneath SAND’s rough, coarse, and often irritating exterior. There’s a genuine touch of video game magic hidden beneath its storm of technical issues. I’ve had moments where I found myself craving more experiences like stealing another player’s Trampler or chasing a low-level Raider to the ends of the planet, peppering them with cannon fire in what felt like a cinematic naval battle. Unfortunately, those highs are often overshadowed by the game’s aforementioned problems. Its lack of proper onboarding also leaves new players confused about what they’re supposed to do, while its tedious solo experience makes it harder to appreciate the strengths that lie underneath.
If developers Hologryph and TowerHaus can address these issues as soon as possible, there is massive potential here, because SAND: Raiders of Sophie’s gameplay is genuinely fun and there is still plenty to discover among the sands. I even find myself close to inviting a few friends over just to host a relaxed session inside my Trampler.
At the moment, however, it is still difficult to recommend the game due to these glaring technical issues. That said, if you are the type who can push past the dustbowl of glitches and bugs, there is a boundless extraction shooter experience here, with a gameplay loop built around these mechanical giants that keeps the genre both fresh and familiar.
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SAND: Raiders of Sophie Product Information
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| Title | SAND: RAIDERS OF SOPHIE |
|---|---|
| Release Date | June 23, 2026 |
| Developer | Hologryph, TowerHaus |
| Publisher | tinyBuild |
| Supported Platforms | PC, PS5, XBXS |
| Genre | FPS, Extraction Shooter |
| Number of Players | 1-15 Players |
| ESRB Rating | RP |
| Official Website | SAND: Raiders of Sophie Official Website |
