Floating Sandbox is a free download that simulates ships and other objects floating in water and how they would react in extreme situations, such as a breach in the hull of a tanker. The title has been developed by Gabriele Giuseppini and is designed to be as close to realistic physics as they’ve been able to possibly manage. It’s safe to say with this one that it’s less of a game and more of an interactive sandbox, where some people will definitely get more mileage out of it than others.
How to Download Floating Sandbox
You can stream it or you can download the game from Game Jolt. Click on the Download button at the end of this review.
Floating Sandbox Review
Gameplay
When it comes to the gameplay and tools that Floating Sandbox provides, it’s kind of hard to address all of them, due to just how vast they are. Instead, I’ll give a brief synopsis of how the gameplay works and go into more detail from there.
The gameplay itself is very simple. Upon first opening the game, you’ll be presented with a standard ship, floating quite comfortably on a body of water. From there, you’re given numerous different tools, such as a slicer, a smasher, a wave maker, and even dynamite. With the plethora of tools at your disposal, you can mess up and destroy the ship at your leisure.
If you want to slice it down the middle and see how the sections will separate and sink, you can do that. Instead of that, though, would you rather cause a small fracture in the hull and watch as it slowly fills up with water and plunges to the icy depths? Again, that’s something you can do quite freely. Even if you wanted something as simple as triggering a tsunami to see how it might be simulated against a cruise liner, is once again, something you can do.
On top of all of that, you can even design your own ships to test out your destructive tendencies on, all through the use of the game’s competent shipbuilder. Admittedly, it might take a little while to get to grips on how to use it properly, but it is simple enough for anyone to pick it up and just give it a go, while also being complicated enough to be interesting for multiple uses. If you don’t fancy that, though, you can simply download a couple of ships off of the developer’s website to save yourself the hassle.
There truly is so much freedom with what you can do in the simulator and that’s definitely where all the fun comes in, however, that all depends on the type of person you are. Depending on whether or not simulators are a lot of fun to you and what you enjoy playing, this one may or may not be a title you spend a lot of time with. The freedom it provides is fantastic and there’s almost an unlimited amount you can do in the simulator, but if you play it once for a couple of minutes and get bored, there isn’t much that can be done about that. This title is clearly designed for a particular niche and it knows that.
Graphics
Where the game does get let down is in the visual department. It’s clearly designed for function over form, which is fine, as the game is more the perfect “what if” scenario when it comes to disasters on the open ocean. Everything looks fine in the game, but nothing looks particularly stunning or worth mentioning. For the most part, it’s simply a fine-looking game with some great mechanics in it.
Audio
On top of that, though, the audio isn’t half-bad. At times it isn’t spectacular, as you can get hit with just a cacophony of noise and it does not mesh well at all, but then at other points, the sound of the waves sounds just as you would expect it to. Not to mention, even the music is rather nice at points, so the audio can definitely be a bit of a mixed bag.
Conclusion
Overall, the game knows what it wants to be and that’s easy to respect. Floating Simulator was never designed to be the most beautiful game ever designed. Instead, it’s a game to simulate open-water disasters and other realistic scenarios with the exceptional physics system that many games probably wish they could even come close to emulating when it comes to floating objects.
