Garry’s Mod [Review by Uzzbuzz]Garry’s Mod is anything and everything you want it to be. It is a sandbox game in which the players can do absolutely anything they want. It is a mod of Half-Life 2 created by Garry Newman and has become increasingly popular over the years, with a massive community of modders constantly pumping out new content, from weapons, to maps, to characters, and more.
Mechanics/Gameplay - How do you even explain the mechanics of this. Well, it’s heavily physics based, much like Half-Life itself so it most similarly compares to a first person shooter, although you can go third person if you’d like. There really is no main mechanic to focus on, since the possibilities are so vast. Many people have their own servers with custom game modes, such as obstacle courses, prop hunt, trouble in terrorist town, role playing, and more! Many of these modes are addons created by the community, and they can honestly be played with for hours on end. Some servers opt just for a sandbox feel where players can do what they want with the current mods included. Anything goes! The depth of the game is outstanding, but unless you’re really into mods or are bursting with creativity and can keep yourself entertained in maps for hours, then you might not play the game for very long. Garry’s Mod very much relies on the player's own ability to create fun for themselves using the tools at their disposal. As far as developer implemented tools, there is still a ton of things you can do with the base game, such as making a custom jetpack chair by attaching boosters, or posing ragdolls with giant inflated heads to create interesting screenshots, or even just spawning a couple hundred zombies and seeing if you can survive. The game can get a bit buggy, but most often that’s your own fault, so you cannot really blame Garry this time. 8.5/10
Fun Factor - As a creative person who enjoys living in other worlds and seeing what other people can create just with a bit of code, some tools, and their imagination, I had a lot of fun for the many, many hours I played this game. Garry’s Mod was actually my first purchase on Steam (along with Team Fortress 2 in a bundle), so it has a special place in my gamer heart and probably is what got me interested in PC gaming to begin with, as I played it back in 2006 before I knew about Steam. Hence, it brought me to Steam. Back then, I even modded it, back when it was a lot more difficult. Since then, I’ve really enjoyed other games that actively encourage modding, such as the Elder Scrolls series and Torchlight. Now I’ll say it again: this game is not for everyone, but it can be if you want it to be. There are maps for everyone. If you want to experience a beautiful hd world, there’s a map for that. If you want a nostalgic recreation of Peach’s Castle from Super Mario 64, but infested with zombies to kill; there’s a map for that. If you want to play mind games with your friends to figure out who the terrorist is, there are servers for that.
In the end, this is a game I highly recommend and I can almost certainly guarantee your money’s worth, especially if you have a creative mind. 9/10
Graphics/Animation - The standalone mod/game looks exactly like Half-Life 2: animations, player models, and all. The graphics are really only limited by what you can create, but as it stands by itself without workshop addons, there is nothing here that sets it apart, as it is just a mod after all. For a mod created in 2004, it looks pretty nice though, but again, that is owed to the game it was built from. Graphics still hold up in 2016 though in my eyes, which is nice. Unfortunately, I cannot give this game a very high scoring in this regard even though the workshop really expands the depth of the graphics. 6.5/10
Music/Sound - Not something you really pay attention to in Garry’s Mod. Again, this is a very difficult category to rate fairly as all the sound assets come from source games, and workshops addons that players create can use virtually any sound clips/songs they want. Hell, there’s even an addon for a full on ingame media player! I applaud the creativity in those involved in creating that addon, as well as many others I have seen, but unfortunately, again, I cannot rate this very high. 5.5/10
Replayability - This game is a top player when it comes to replayability. You can play it as long as you’d like and it’d never get boring, as long as you don’t get boring, or you’ve exhausted thousands of hours on the game. Even just the standard props and vehicles and npcs and weapons can keep players occupied for hours on end. Once you end up modding the game though, you won’t be able to stop. Some people spend thousands of hours just playing Trouble in Terrorist Town. That’s insane! One mode that some guy decided to create has many, many players putting in many, many hours into something that was not ever intended to be in the game, because nothing really is. The game grows as the playerbase does, and believe me, the playerbase is still going strong. If there’s one game that can score perfectly for replayability, it’s this one. The fact that some people have legitimately played over a year’s worth of hours without just idling goes to show how much time has been sunk in here. 10/10
Level Design - What level design? Again, and this is starting to get annoying, isn’t it, but when you start Garry’s Mod for the first time, you start with a basic two maps. One of these maps is a standard one arch building with open grass for miles, and the other is a simple small map with some water and empty buildings to go in. It is up to the players to create and download maps, or join servers that include certain maps/addons. If I were rating this based on the creativity of the players, it’d be scoring very well. But, given the game like it is, I cannot score it too highly. When you first load up the game, the few maps you have are not super exciting, and if you’re lost and don’t know what to do, you may never play other maps, and the given maps are lackluster. 4/10
Achievements - Do not get this game for an easy completion. Since its release in 2004 on steam, there are only a small handful of legitimate completions of this game, myself included (I have to brag; this took forever). The achievements are long, the achievements are grindy, the achievements are difficult and not in the sense of difficulty per se, but in terms of being very hard to obtain. The achievements fall into 5 categories: Simple Play, Grind, Playtime, Workshop, and User-based.
For the simple play achievements, there are few: one each for playing single player, multiplayer, and a non-sandbox mode. Another one for loading maps and getting coding errors in the console or otherwise, and one for a top secret phrase that changes now and then.
The grind achievements consist of excessive amounts of spawning types of objects, opening the menu 100,000 times, loading the game a lot, or interacting/killing certain things many times. You will get these just from playing around a lot, and if you try and go for them, you might get a little bored out of your skull.
The playtime achievements are for playing for a certain amount of time: a day, a week, a month, and a year. You do not actually have to be playing, but you must be in a server for that long. This amounts to 8760 hours for one year, something I have left my computer on over the course of about 16 months to accomplish. YOu might not want to do this unless you are a very hardcore achievement hunter. The other side of playtime achievements are for staying in one server for 4 and 8 hours, which I believe you can do on your own server in case you get tired of playing and feel like someone would kick you for being idle.
The workshop achievements are of fair intent, but horrible execution. The most difficult to obtain one requires 1000 other people to thumbs up something you’ve made for the game. This will not come to many since making a good addon takes some work, and knowledge of code, plus you will need to get quite active in the community for a while. It also does not help that most people subscribe to download addons and then never rate up due to forgetfulness. So do not be surprised if your workshop item is only nearing 100 likes with upwards of 1000 subscribers who’ve downloaded it.
Now the user-based achievements: one requires you to play with Garry himself. Good luck, as he’s usually playing Rust, his other game, and rarely plays Garry’s Mod nowadays. The other is for playing in a server with ten friends, which will come naturally if you play a lot on community servers as like I said, the same people will play for hours and hours.
Overall the achievements cover the game perfectly, but they’re a little rough and expect way too much out of the dedicated completionist. Achievements that require the community to like something really just promotes garbage flooding the workshop, which does happen, but luckily a lot of the good still shines through. Achievements for playtime are usually not a very good idea either, but I can understand that these were some of the first achievements on Steam, and they showcase the game as good as they can, which is no easy feat for a game like this. 7/10
Pros:
+Endless possibilities/replayability
+Large, active community still
+Fun for just about everyone
Cons:
- The large community does have many trolls
- Not much to do for an uncreative mind
Overall Score: 7.2/10
3.5