If you’re someone who is born in the 90’s you probably have heard and played the game Alchemy before, where you are given the very basic elements and you’ll have to mix and match all sorts of different compounds, materials, weather and life. Improved modern variant of the game is Doodle God and Doodle Devil.
The Sandbox is a game with pixel art and also understandable as pixel art is the only way to be intuitive in such games. You’ll see why in this review.
You meet a rather biased menu with every button placed on the right side. From top to bottom, left to right, we start off with the blue flame button which is actually your Mana, a currency in the game to buy “shortcuts” to create whatever that you discovered. Free Mod and Gallery is locked until the Campaign mode is progressed further. The trophy shows the achievements menu, the gear for settings, the book for an index of tools and everything discovered.
In the campaign, there are a lot of spinoffs from the original story, but each are only available after in-app purchase. A little expensive to purchase each and every spinoff too!
Starting off with the Initial Story mode, a very simply and progressive tutorial teaches you basic controls and the usage of each buttons on the top bar.
From left to right, you get a Items menu where all things created or discovered is shown there, alongside with technology, living organisms, elements, compounds and materials. A brush to select your tools to either “paint” your selected item or to choose other tools to do other things. An eraser is of course to erase one particular pixel.
Then the magnifying glass is to zoom, the complicated one is to toggle weather, temperature, sun, wind and light. The Earth icon is to save, reset or load any progress. The icon with Day on it is to see your progress of the campaign, showing you objectives and hints, which are purchasable by Mana. The blue flame which is your Mana, is shown again here.
I do enjoy the little jokes/puns they put into the dialogues and also the item descriptions, it certainly did make me chuckle as if something just hit me.
This game will certainly be hot as flaming lava if controls, zooming and panning are a little more polished and refined. The soundtrack is a little off, since it’s literally an 8 bit electro mix soundtrack. Graphics… I can’t give any comments as the 8 bit Minecraft styles work the best for such a game, especially to separate each block from another.
The only complaint I have is that the game, as it only has one major flaw that spoils everything else, including the experience. The time when you start creating small stuff. The zooming is certainly too big, the panning is unresponsive and I always randomly put stuff all around the place when I used my two fingers to pan.
The verdict?
Rating for The Sandbox : 6/10
Certainly lives up to its title, but the controls are a little bit messy. Too many in-app purchase, just enough to turn the players’ mood off. A direct interactive remake of the original game Alchemy.
Oh, the main campaign and story mode is free too! Get it now on the Google Play Store!
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