Garry's Mod fans have been waiting years for Facepunch Studios to release its new title, s&box. The sandbox game had a lot of hype going into it, saying you could essentially make whatever you wanted, and if you wanted to make your own game, you could go onto publish it on Steam, making any money from it entirely for yourself. It was envisioned as a sandbox paradise, but what we got as the end result was anything but.
Of the 2,263 user reviews on Steam at the time of writing, only 45% are positive. That still keeps the user review score at an overall Mixed rating, but it shows that s&box is nowhere nearly as popular as its predecessor. "Successor to Gmod? No, far from it. This is a f****** mess...This is disgraceful to it's predecessor" wrote one reviewer.
The sentiments are shared by a large proportion of the top reviewers. Those who leave negative reviews on s&box go into a lot of detail, citing AI images in games made by creators, as well as lacking features, sloppy performance, and lacking accessibility compared to other, similar platforms like Roblox.
There are positive takes out there, though. A lot of people acknowledge this game is a platform for making games in its earliest stages, and so the wider user base shouldn't expect GMod levels of functionality right out of the gate. Moreover, the developers have acknowledged issues, and have from now to work on them and hopefully improve the user score. We'll have to check back in with s&box soon and see if perception has shifted at all.