742nd played so far
Genre: Role-Playing
Platform: PC
Year of Release: 2005
Developer: Facepunch Studios
Publisher: Valve Corporation
Garry’s Mod, taken on its own, isn’t strictly a game. It’s a physics sandbox to either mess around in (which you could call a game, but without goals) or to play the maps, game modes and props created by other people. And mostly multiplayer – the game really encourages you to work together. It’s like Minecraft without any of the gameplay mechanisms.
Since I’m feeling a bit limited finding much in the sandbox mode, I’ve gotten myself a bunch of game modes and maps to see what it’s like. Jazztronauts, for example, has just been released as I write this – a mode that takes you to other maps and has you steal its props. How does it work? We’ll see, but clearly it does somehow.
Our Thoughts
I’m not sure I have much to say about Garry’s Mod on its own. It does what it says, import packages from other Source games and place them, pose them and let them move. They can move and do things and I’m sure you can build some cool videos in it, but as a game it lacks goals and systems and as a sandbox, there’s little innate discovery to be done. That’s fine, but I couldn’t really muster any inspiration to do anything with that.
So on to game modes I went. It was quite tricky – I downloaded a whole bunch of them, but there were several I couldn’t quite get to work. Once I got through adjusting game modes, some seemed broken and others weren’t really worth much on my own, so that’s what it was.
Jazztronauts, however, did what I wanted. Through whatever magic they managed to put in the game (it feels pretty impressive) they created a mode that lets you travel through pretty much all of the maps on the Steam workshop for the game and steal props and other things from it. The hub level showed off a nice environment, though the writing felt to me as being of mixed quality, but it was interesting to see all the different maps out there. Admittedly, some were broken because prerequisites weren’t handled well, but it’s been amazing to see.
Sadly, I wasn’t able to quickly get any story maps to work. It’s possible that I overlooked the ones I had downloaded – I struggled quite a bit with identifying maps and making sense of everything. It adds to the homemade feeling of the whole game, but I guess I didn’t dive quite deeply enough.
Final Thoughts
Garry’s Mod is an amazing tool for creating content. It doesn’t come build in with that, but as a sandbox tool it looks amazingly featured to work with. If I had any plans, I’d love to try it – and maybe one day I will – but don’t expect an amazing experience out of the box. Even for this, I feel I spent a lot of time preparing the game to create what I wanted. It wouldn’t have felt right for this game without that, though.