After my slightly-disappointing 1-week exploration of Decentraland (DCL), I decided to visit the other popular crypto “Metaverse”, The Sandbox (TSB). To my surprise, there was a huge difference in quality between the two metaverses.

You can read the full review here, and it covers 25 game maps and has pictures from each of them. Unfortunately, I have a 20-photo limit per reddit post, so this post is just a tiny portion of the full review.

Unlike DCL, The Sandbox is actually an enjoyable gaming experience, but the crypto part is still very incomplete (which is forgivable since it’s still in alpha). DCL is the opposite: its gaming sucks, it's full of bugs, but the crypto part works fine.

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A map for the Sun Hung Kai & Co company showing you how NPCs populate the whole map

TSB feels more like a single-player game with many different maps. There are other players, but they're like ghosts in Dark Souls. You can see what they're doing, but you can't interact with them.

Back in February during the Lunar New Year event, there were 22 available maps to play. That has now ended, so many of them have been removed. Instead, we now have 2 new Rabbids maps.

One of the 2 new Rabbids maps: New Year in Plunga City

You can see from the image below that these maps can get very big. The image below shows the size of the smallest 1x1 tile.

From the Rabbids game. This is the map size of the SMALLEST 1x1 tile. There is also an underground section you can't see.

Maps

Here are all of The Sandbox's land tiles. There are hundreds of these.

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The full Land Map

BUT, most tiles are not currently playable. This was the playable map back in February with only 22 available games. While the Sandbox is in Alpha release, it will only release a few maps at a time, and then remove the previous season's maps. So you'll always get new maps every month.

February's map for the Lunar New Year special events

Differences between DCL and The Sandbox

• TSB is focused on gaming: The biggest difference is that TSB is very gaming-focused while DCL has a variety of experiences. DCL's locations might be for storefronts, businesses, advertisements, art, and other activities. TSB's maps are all games. Most of them contain many mini-games and quests that you need to complete.
• Even though every map has a strong focus on games, some are still built for businesses, organizations, or cultural areas. So they may have advertisements

A business map for Metagreen

• P2E: There is a Play-To-Earn element in TSB. Most of the maps allow you to earn rewards for completing every quest. You can then mint NFTs or obtain SAND as prizes. Some of the prizes are only available if you own Land or Avatar NFTs.
• Visuals: DCL has Sim-like graphics while TSB has blocky graphics (like Lego games)

Every avatar and entity is blocky

• Sound: DCL sound is buggy as hell. TSB has professional soundtracks in each of their maps.
• Bugs: DCL is super-buggy. I can't go 5 minutes without hitting a bug or major graphics glitch. TSB gameplay is mostly bug-free. But their website and rewards system is buggy has hell.
• Blockchain: DCL is on Polygon PoS and just works. The Sandbox is on Ethereum, where gas fees are so high it doesn't make sense to mint P2E rewards sometimes. It's slowly moving to Polygon, and some of the newer avatars and NFTs are already there.
• Multiplayer: Aside from a few locations, DCL is a ghost town. There are events (like DJ concerts) where you can hang out with each other and special events where you can pick up free NFTs. TSB is mainly a single-player game. There are some multiplayer maps, but I have yet to experience one myself.

A larger 2x2 map. This one goes very high (those gray clouds are in-game platforms). You can only see 1/4 of the map in this picture.

Game Map Reviews

Reddit threads have a 20-picture limit, and I have nearly 100 screenshots in my review post. So if you want to see the detailed reviews, visit this link.

Below is just the data summary of all the TSB games I've played.

Most of the games are quite kid-friendly and easy to beat. Almost all of them are heavily based on minigames and fetch quests. Paca Death Run is the only one that I found to be very difficult. In fact, there is an even-harder "difficult-mode" on that maps where half of the checkpoints are removed, and it was harder than the first half of Celeste.

Paca Death Run: This difficult map took me 60 minutes and nearly 100 deaths

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