A Devil's Playground: A Look at Sandbox Games (Part One)

When people think of Sandbox Style games, they usually immediately think of Grand Theft Auto IV and Red Dead Redemption, or any other Rockstar Game. Then, the passing glimpses of the Spider-Man games come to mind. But what about the games that could have had that moment in the sun? Mercenaries 2 and The Saboteur, while not exactly stand out games, were open world games. The one that comes closest to GTA 4 is Mafia 2, but it still doesn't hit off among most Sandbox fans.

This is kind of sad, to me, really, because the over all mechanics of the whole open world system is done better in Mafia 2 than in Grand Theft Auto. Hand to hand combat feels like a game instead of a chore, each vehicle does drive differently, but all do respond to your commands. The world feels alive with actual people other than pallet swaps of the same three people. There are more variations in missions. Even the collectables, wanted posters and (while anachronistic) Playboy centerfolds feels right.

GTA 4 has one leg up: mini games. Yes, Red Dead Redemption had mini games too, but it also had a story everyone could relate to. GTA 4's story, to me, feels unpolished due to the fact that the mini games are essential to the over all game itself where RDR's are optional. The story in GTA 4 feels less relatable to me due to the fact that I was born in America, but I can still feel sympathetic for Niko Bellic because he feels lied to by his cousin, and, moreso, by his own over zealousness for the American Dream and revenge. Revenge is perfectly a human relatable emotion, and one that's a little over used for this type of game, in my opinion.

Part of what makes The Saboteur and Mercenaries 2 fall in the sandbox game is the lack of mission variation. Blow stuff up, run away, hide, repeat (hide in Saboteur, stand there like Chuck Norris in Mercenaries 2). For a $9.99 downloadable game, that's not bad. For a $60 game... that's not a whole hell of a lot. The Spider-Man games did it a little bit better by adding more mission variation, such as stopping robberies and saving falling civilians. But the over and under load of missions only serve to distract from what the sandbox game is supposed to be, often pulling you away from the exploration. GTA 4 does the same thing with the main missions being cell phone calls that will put a marker on your map, making it so the only path way you can have at the time on your GPS is to the mission.

This is unacceptable when you start off in a game. You have no way of setting a point to save your game without ending the mission. The map the game comes with doesn't even have the save points marked on it, but has everything else. Combined with the sheer scope of the city, it makes the game over complicated for new gamers, giving them too much to do, introduced in too little time, hoping that they'll catch on by the end of the game. Some will stay dedicated to it, but most new comers will flee from it like a lobster from boiling water.

Next time, I'll be talking about how other genres can be made into open world games, and how genres beyond action/adventure integrate into the system so well that you may not realize it at first.