28 July 2024
Time to enter the future of entertainment with Sandbox VR! A virtual reality company which takes immersion to the next level with full body motion, exhilarating games and advanced technology. Sandbox VR is all about taking you and 5 friends into the virtual world using the world’s most advanced virtual reality equipment to create an experience which other companies or home VR cannot compete with. They are huge in the US with over 30 locations and have launched 2 venues in the UK and more coming across Europe in the near future. With backing from some huge celebrities such as Katy Perry & Will Smith, it has certainly caught our eye to see what all the fuss is about.
Our review focuses on the London location, which we visited during the summer on a Sunday afternoon. Prior to attending, it is highly recommend to book online for your group. Online you will find a range of different games to pick from and you can select from 2-6 players per group. With 8 different games available, you can choose from adventure, space, horror, zombies and even the popular Squid Games. Each game provides about an hour of entertainment and you are guaranteed to have a unique & thrilling time in their virtual worlds.
Tickets range from £35 to £60 per person, depending on how many people book per group. All bookings are private, so you’ll have your own dedicated host for the session and private playing area too. Below, we take a further look into Squid Games Virtual, the newest game by Sandbox VR to see how it compares to other virtual reality experiences.
Before we talk about our experience and how Squid Games & Sandbox VR is one of the best virtual reality experiences we’ve done, we want to talk about Toni. Toni is the UK’s first robotic bartender and you can find it at Sandbox VR London. Whilst this technology is quite new and you may have seen it on cruise ships and overseas, we’ve not seen one in the UK so it’s great to finally see. The robotic bartender creates your perfect cocktail from one of the many options on the menu.
How it works? Very simple, you select a drink on the tablet and then head over to the machine as it starts to create your cocktail. With two arms, it knows what spirits and mixers are needed and even shakes & stirs your drink before putting it in a cup and placing it down ready for collection. We loved seeing how this worked and found it mesmerising. You can enjoy a drink before or after your session and a selection of beers, wines and spirits can also be purchased at the venue, but these will be presented by a human host.
Moving onto our experience, we found the venue easy to get to. It is located near Convent Gardens and the closest tube station is Holborn. The venue is open everyday, with it being open as early as 10am and can stay open till as late as midnight. It is always best to check the opening hours prior to visiting via the website however, we are guaranteed you will always find a time to visit with these amazing operating hours. Heading inside the venue, we were met by the friendly staff, checked in and filled in a waiver on a tablet before taking a seat to wait for our start time.
Once it was our time to start our experience, we were guided to our playing area with a few hosts. The team then got you prepared to enter the virtual world. As all the experiences have full motion control, you have these trackers attached to your wrists and ankles, as well as a haptic suits on your chest before the virtual headsets get added with headphones also. Whilst it is a fair amount of gear, they do have a great air conditioned environment to keep you as cool as possible whilst you play.
After watching some trailers and instructions on how to play, we then entered the Squid Games world. What shocked us is that whilst we knew we would be playing some of the well known challenges, it was fantastic to see it had a story and cutscenes to make it more of an experience, rather than just playing some minigames and moving on.
We got to play games such as red light green light, which put all of your team against eachother to collect coins across the map and to put them in the head. If you moved on the red light, you would be shot with lasers and be virtually dead for a small amount of time. Other games included catch and match, which was a sorting game but had bombs to dodge and throw at the rest of your team. Our favourite was make a shape, which reminded us very much of hole in the wall. We had to match the shape with our body as the hole in the wall came to us, otherwise you would virtually die. All of the games were different and so fun, allowing each of our group to shine at at least one of the games.
Squid Games Virtual had us honestly out of breath, sweating yet exhilarated after our experience. The time went too quickly, and we had so much fun in this virtual world. What we really enjoyed about the advanced technology here, was that the tracking was spot on in the virtual world. This meaning you knew exactly where everyone was, not roughly, exactly! This means some of the games allowed you to high five and touch each other’s shoulders from example, as the precision was spot on. This matched with the quality of the virtual world and not having to hold controllers and using the trackers on the wrists and ankles, made so much sense and added more immersion to the game.
After the experience came to an end, the team came and helped take the gear off and this gets taken to be cleaned prior to the next group playing. You get taken to get your belongings and then get seated upstairs in the debrief area. Here you can have a glass of water and watch your movie. This is essentially a highlight reel of your experience, with customer scenes added in from the real world of you playing plus what was happening in the virtual world. This gets sent to your emails automatically after the experience free of charge, which is an amazing touch.
We all agreed that Sandbox VR is by far the best virtual reality experience we’ve done and for 2024, is one of our favourite activities in London. Whilst our adventure was more minigames, it will be interesting to see how a more mission based game would play out of a horror survival shoot em up style game would be like.
A huge thank you to the team at Sandbox VR for inviting our team of three and supplying us with a free cocktail each from the robotic bartender plus a free VR experience. In return, we provided our thoughts in this review and made some TikTok’s of what you can expect when you visit. For more information, check out their website and let us know your thoughts over on social media.
@thrillnation would you want to try this out? 🤖🍹 #robo #robot #roboarm #cocktail #bar #london #uk @Sandbox UK & Ireland ♬ sonido original - Chico En Línea
PHOTO GALLERY
COMPANY WEBSITE
book a visit
BOOK DIRECTLY FOR THE BEST PRICES
More REVIEWS & news
Scare Kingdom 2026 Review
INTRODUCTION Scare Kingdom is back for 2026! Found at Mrs Dowsons Farm Park in Blackburn,...
FEAR Scream Park 2026 Review
INTRODUCTION FEAR Scream Park is back for 2026! Found at Avon Valley Adventure & Wildlife Park...
The Nightmare Realm London 2026 Review
INTRODUCTION The Nightmare Realm is here for Halloween 2026! After 17 years of spooking audiences...
Thrillnation.net is your ultimate resource for unbiased reviews of thrilling attractions across Europe. You'll find us covering theme parks, escape rooms, water parks and more.
Follow Us
For all of our latest news and up-to-date goings on, make sure you follow us on our social media channels!
WORK WITH US
We can offer a variety of different services from sponsored reviews to video content creation. Get in touch to discuss working with us.
Website lovingly created and managed by INOV8 Marketing