FOV 90
Welcome to FOV 90, an FPS column from staff writer Morgan Park. Every other week, I cover topics relevant to first-person shooter enjoyers, spanning everything from multiplayer and singleplayer to the old and the new.
It only took 90 minutes with S&box (pronounced “sandbox”) to learn what many closed beta users have known about it for years: this is, tragically, not Garry’s Mod 2.
Yes it has a map editor and, yes, you can still weld together strange vehicles in a sandbox mode. But in S&box, those foundational features of Gmod—the hacked-together toolset that allowed hobbyist modders to remix Valve’s work into unexpected delights—are minor bullet points.
Garry Newman’s Facepunch calls S&box the “spiritual successor” to Gmod, but if that spirit is present, I’ve yet to encounter it. None of the qualities that made Gmod an amazing, lasting anomaly of PC gaming are relevant to what Facepunch has actually made here: Roblox. They made a Roblox.
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S&box is, first and foremost, its engine and platform. Its home page, a scrolling grid of squares with gaudy (and often AI generated) thumbnails, has more in common with YouTube than Gmod. Like in Roblox and Fortnite, creators are paid by Facepunch for making popular games that entice people to play for a long time. It’s no surprise, then, that a day one performer on S&box is Mow The Lawn, an incremental, creatively barren riff on the trash that children gobble up on those other platforms.
Also, there are paid avatar cosmetics subject to Steam Marketplace pricing fluctuations—yipee.
Still, great games will surface. It’s already impressive to see the breadth of genres possible with Facepunch’s modified Source 2 toolset. I sampled a third-person skateboarding game with believably Tony Hawk grinding, a top-down Vampire Survivors clone, and a genuinely fun PvP golfing game with Mario Kart powerups.
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I wish you could chalk S&box’s malleability up to the strengths of Source 2, but Facepunch appears to have so heavily modified Valve’s code that it’s difficult to detect where Source begins and Facepunch ends.
Take S&box’s early FPS offerings: I first played the aptly named DEATH MATCH, a bog-standard shooter with some Valve-y qualities like Shift-walking and pistol starts, but it doesn’t feel like a Source shooter at all. The gun models, sounds, feedback, and hit detection are terrible. The same goes for Strike Force, a Call of Duty clone with an aim-down-sights mechanic and a bunch of AI slop profile cards.
Here’s some gameplay of both, if you’re curious. If you’ve ever played the FPSes that do numbers on Roblox, you’ll especially recognize Strike Force’s odor:
I don’t call those games out to harp on their creators (though if you’re trafficking in slop, you’ve surrendered all claims to have tried), but to ask: Why isn’t S&box already good for the one type of gameplay that it should have locked down by default? This is the Counter-Strike 2 engine, but you wouldn’t know it by loading into Flatgrass and firing Facepunch’s god-awful assault rifle. Is there any Valve goodness in here at all? The ragdolls are nice—I’ll give it that.
Perhaps Facepunch prefers the separation. It’s reasonable that the studio would want to blaze its own trail with S&box instead of remaining welded at the hip to Valve and its 20-year-old assets. That’s cool, but its bulbous sausage men are not an appealing replacement for Dr. Kleiner on a rocket skateboard.
Honestly, S&box’s whole business model doesn’t inspire confidence that it’ll grow into a haven for grassroots PC gaming creativity. The paid cosmetics are uncool and tacky—come on man, this is a $20 game! And I’m concerned about what that home page might look like a year or two from now when devs figure out what’s most profitable on S&box and simply do that, but times a thousand. Maybe Facepunch has a plan to thwart low-effort success, but considering Newman’s libertarian perspective on AI (don’t worry, the market will sort itself out), I’m not holding my breath.
If you’re like me, you might be disappointed that S&box has a “business model” at all. Part of the charm of Gmod, and a reason it still has enduring appeal, is its hobbyist community. Every strange horror maze, prop hunt map, and nuclear bomb add-on was made for the sake of it—for funsies, for goofs. Thanks to an engagement-based payment scheme, that’s not something you can assume about S&box creations. Perhaps Gmod is simply too pure to happen twice.
If you’re picking up what S&box is putting down, or just endlessly curious to see what Facepunch has been cooking up all these years, I still would recommend you hold off for now. Essentially everything in S&box is varying levels of janky or busted at the moment—even joining multiplayer servers has like a 30% success rate. Plus, some of the most popular games on the front page are Gmod remakes like Prop Hunt, so there’s really no rush.
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