All posts tagged in Sandbox
Sep 7, 2019
With the Kickstarter campaign of Potion Paws going live last Thursday, September 5th, 2019, the developers at Bitten Toast Games decided to throw an online community event within the multiplayer mode of Garden Paws. You may remember our review of the most adorable simulation RPG here and how we haven’t yet had the chance to try out the online feature of the game. Since it has been one of our favorites this year, we backed its spookier potion-making counterpart Potion Paws and took part in the giveaways and party! Besides, if you own both games on Steam, you’ll get crossover items in Creative Mode.
Online Multiplayer and Creative Mode
When you play online in Garden Paws, you have the choice to create a server room and allow up to 4 players into your world. They can help you farm, fight monsters in the dungeon, and pretty much anything else you can do in single-player campaign. This is also a particularly useful way to share rare items. Creative Mode is basically a sandbox mode where you already have access to every single item the game has to offer with some added bonuses which include: a jetpack and magic carpet to fly around, the lawnmower from the Summer games festival, confetti canon, and more! If you’re looking for players to join you can always check out the awesome community of Garden Paws on the official Discord channel here.
Garden Paws Online Community Event
The developers Dan and Kristina are frequently live-streaming on Twitch showcasing gameplay, accepting requests from followers while they continue to add new items and features to the game, and occasionally put on a “creative challenge” out to the community. Meaning, they tell you the theme and you can use the tools and items at your disposal to build and paint anything you can imagine! As mentioned above, to celebrate the Kickstarter launch of Potion Paws, Kristina opened a Dev Server allowing up to 32 people to join and create something carnival themed. You can catch the full 8-hour stream on Twitch here, or see below for our particular experience!
Photo Gallery of Online Party
Since the theme was “carnival”, fellow tater Joelle (that’s me!) decided to join the fun and created her own Balloon Shop! In Garden Paws you can either have your character hold balloons in their hands while running around, or place them anywhere for decoration. As seen in the screenshots below, you can build foundations, fences, paths and place furniture, and then you can paint them with solid colors or patterns. There are even letters of the alphabet to use! I gave anyone who walked up to my booth a balloon because I was so proud of my contribution to this event.
Next up we took a look at Kristina’s (the dev) half-built Ferris-wheel using wood pieces and cabana benches. We all took the available seating for a wonderful photo-op overlooking the sea and islands.
Here we have a wonderfully creative way to build a merry-go-round using in-game farm animals and pets! The details here must have taken quite a long time! Everyone hopped on for a ride! I chose the glittering rare unicorn because I could; I got there first.
There were 3 major attractions that actually turned into little mini-games for all to try out. Someone took garden hedges and created quite the challenging maze, another created a huge 3-story glass house maze, and finally at the tallest point on the island you could glide through some hoops and bounce off of trampolines at the bottom. It took me a while to complete the glass house maze but I had some excellent cheerleaders by my side!
During Creative Mode, you still go through the day/night cycle so that all of your hard work saves at the end of the day. Every time we start the day, we end up together in a specific location which lead to shenanigans. This area of the gallery contains immature screenshots because, well, there exists a fart mechanic. “Look Ma! I’m farting on Twitch TV!”
We redeemed ourselves afterward by celebrating with many fireworks and confetti! This is what happens when you can place as many fireworks as you want before lighting them and being able to equip a confetti canon that you can fire off to your hearts content!
Here are a few other buildings created by the community, including a floating deck perfect for relaxing and enjoying the view. No worries about falling, we’re all wearing jetpacks. We’d also really like to know who built that boat from scratch and how!
After a long day of partying, we all relaxed inside a forest sanctuary built by placing quite a few trees to form walls. I have my pet deer with me and I’m roasting some marshmallows by the fire.
I had a really fun experience with the online multiplayer of Garden Paws and would like to thank everyone that joined this party! Hopefully this brings even more players to the game and to this amazing community full of really great people. If you have any extra screenshots of this event, please feel free to share them with us on social media or comment/tag if you see your character. If you’re just starting out, you can check out some of our Garden Paws tips for beginners here.
- Aug 31, 2019
Any game that says it will allow us to ‘shape the world under our feet like clay’ has our attention. Astroneer first released, digitally-only, on Steam and Xbox One in February of this year. During that time, this space-exploration game has maintained a ‘very positive’ rating across over 34,000 reviews on Steam. And now we have the great news that the game will release onto PS4 as well! You can buy a physical copy of Astroneer for Xbox One or PS4 on November 15th, 2019.
You can watch the PS4 announcement video right here. It doesn’t have a lot of gameplay content! But watching one little pioneer-astronaut play with his buddy (literally!) via PS4 controller was really cute.
Game Features
- Reshape the ground under your feet as though it were made of clay.
- Survive on and explore carefully crafted planets that can be entirely deformed and traversed.
- Snap together components and objects to build bases and vehicles.
- Play with friends in 4 player online drop-in/drop-out co-op.
- Discover and uncover the mysteries of the solar system
It should be noted that the one consistent note of dissatisfaction with this game was in its multiplayer aspect. Glitches plague the multiplayer feature, even according to many of those who love the game on Steam. We don’t yet know if that will change as the game releases for PS4.
We’re quite excited to play this space exploration sandbox game. Let’s build bases on every planet and shape each world to suit its own unique style! We can’t wait to join PC and Xbox One players and see what is possible in Astroneer on November 15.
If you like games of space exploration, where you can build bases on the planets you visit, you might want to get a good look at Kerbal Space Program 2.
- Nov 23, 2018
[dropcap]R[/dropcap]ollerCoaster Tycoon Adventures (RCTA) is an upcoming amusement park simulation game developed exclusively for the Nintendo Switch. Developers of the popular RollerCoaster Tycoon franchise, Atari, have announced that RCTA will be available in Europe on the 29th November, and in North America on the 13th December.
Despite criticism over Atari’s need to crowdfund RCTA, as well as concerns that the Switch console won’t do the game justice, Atari has said that the game is “built from the ground up to take advantage of the Switch’s best features.”
Features:
- 3 Exciting Game Modes: Adventure, Scenario, and Sandbox.
- An all-new Event System in the game’s Adventure Mode
- 7 Types of Customizable Coasters: Wooden, Steel, Winged, Hyper, Inverted, Dive, and Accelerator.
- More than 50 vibrant colors to choose from when customizing rides, roller coasters, shops, and restaurants.
- Improve the landscape of your park by placing and altering paths, foliage, and river tiles.
- 4 Distinctive Park Locations: Alpine, Moon, Canyon, and Tropics.
- Over 200 rides, restaurants, shops and decorations available for placement.
- Intuitive JoyCon and Touchscreen Controls provide freedom to play how you want.
- Seamless play between dock mode and handheld mode lets you play anywhere!
- Runs at 1080P docked, and 720P in handheld mode.
The game can be purchased digitally through the Nintendo eShop, or as a physical copy from retail outlets. UK Switch owners can pre-order the game at Argos for £39.99.
- Nov 14, 2018
The publisher of My Time at Portia, Team 17, have released an all-new crafting trailer for the upcoming game.
My Time at Portia is an upcoming sandbox RPG game with farming, crafting, gathering and mining elements. Upon starting the game, players arrive in the charming town of Portia where they seek a fresh start. Upon inheriting your Pa’s run-down workshop, which contains only a Workbench and a Workshop Handbook, the aim is to make your workshop the best around.
Sharing similarities with games such as Yonder and Stardew Valley, the gameplay of My Time at Portia is definitely very crafting-orientated. However, the game also offers players the chance to interact with quirky characters, grow crops and raise animals, and uncover the secrets and mysteries of the post-apocalyptic Portia.
A popular Early Access version is currently available to play on Steam whilst we await the official version and console versions. Whilst an official release date for the game has not yet been announced, the crafting trailer could imply that the wait is almost over!
