GoreBox Review – Gary’s Mod for the younger crowd

GoreBox is a game that took me by surprise, creeping up on my radar unexpectedly. Despite its quiet launch, the game managed to jump to Steam’s popular new releases list nearly a week after its initial release. The sudden surge in popularity, backed by numerous positive user reviews and high player counts, piqued my curiosity. I couldn’t help but wonder how this game, loved by so many, had somehow eluded my attention.

At first, I was perplexed about what exactly made GoreBox so appealing to players. Many of the features promised on the game’s homepage felt disappointing at worst and underwhelming at best. Soon, however, I quickly realized what game I had my hands on and why it was so popular.

Gorebox is, essentially, a Gary’s Mod clone. It mimics the idea of Gary’s Mod by giving players a handful of maps, a gravity gun, and a collection of assets to play around with to make their own fun. The game is similar enough that the inspiration is undeniably noticeable to anyone who’s spent any time in Gmod. However, GoreBox lacks a significant amount of depth when compared to its inspiration, both in the assets available and the power of the engine. You simply won’t be creating any of the phenomenally impressive gizmos or destructive gadgets you would be able to in Gmod.

The library of assets available to creators in GoreBox, even including the player-run workshop, is decisively smaller than Gmod. This is not totally to the game’s fault, as Gary’s Mod has a decade or more of fan-created content available to players. It would be an impressive feat for GoreBox to compete with even the base Half-Life source content you would get from Gmod. GoreBox does have a handful of its own assets, but they are less interactive than most of what you’ll find in Gmod, though enough to give you an idea of what the game is all about.

The game advertises its dynamic gore and ragdoll systems as its standout features, but they’re fine at best. The ragdoll is nothing crazy, nor would I really expect it to be a selling point in any game at this point in time. The gore is very unimpressive with only a few dismemberments that were weirdly hard to pull off. Most of the damage you’ll see in this gore system is red decals painted onto the body parts of enemies you shoot or slice. I don’t really need gore to make a game fun, but I was surprised by how lackluster it was given how heavily the game advertised it — Gore is even in the name, after all.

Everything in the game just felt so basic, even down to the cars, which in a game that advertises destruction don’t dent or crash or do anything except explode after a predetermined amount of damage.

To say I was confused at this point would be an understatement. This was just an underwhelming variation of Gmod with a third of the content available in Gary’s Mod for half of the price ($4.99 not on sale). The game was inoffensive; nothing terrible but why was it so popular? What was garnering 500+ positive reviews and bringing this game to Steam’s popular list?

That’s when I saw it.

Is that… a twin towers map? The backrooms? One of those weird cursed jpg monsters that chase you down, blasting sound clips? The pieces began to fit together. This is the kind of content you’d find in Gmod’s Steam Workshop, “edgy” memes and internet trends, specifically the kind that kids liked to latch onto. Here it all was, though, presented as the main features of the game.

This was Gmod for children.

Specifically, this was for kids who wanted to jump on the latest Gmod meme or horror trends, but for some reason or another couldn’t get Gary’s Mod itself. This game was made for children who want to be chased by Obunga Nextbots through the Backrooms but didn’t have computers capable of running Gary’s Mod. The game was purposefully made as a mirror of Gary’s Mod that’s more accessible to a younger audience. It is for exactly the kind of crowd that only needs a gun, a bunch of NPCs, and a big map to run around and have fun with.

Looking through the server browser only confirmed this suspicion, with servers titled “School Roleplay” and indecipherable descriptions that clearly showed the whole thing was being run by children.

Once I figured out what GoreBox was, I realized that it was pretty good for the market it was going for. As a purposefully dumbed-down Gmod, GoreBox is fantastic. It serves its purpose well, which seems to be to appeal to an audience that wants to have fun with Gary’s Mod’s physics engine and community-made content and give them a more accessible way of doing so. You can even play the game on your phone, which is a level of accessibility Gmod could never hope to achieve.

While the game clearly feels made for children or people who want a vastly simplified version of Gmod, there’s no place in its marketing where it explicitly says these things. I think it may even avoid doing so, simply because advertising yourself as “easier Gmod” might lead to some legal trouble.

Judging GoreBox as a standalone game, I’d say it’s okay but certainly not perfect. It doesn’t do anything new and it is in fact a lackluster version of another game on the market. However, if you can’t run Gary’s Mod, are confused by Gmod’s daunting UI, complex systems and sometimes confusing multiplayer, or just want to play something similar with your kids, I’d consider this game a great alternative.

GoreBox was reviewed on the PC. Find more detailed looks at popular and upcoming titles in the Game Reviews section of our website! GoreBox is available on Steam and Google Play.