Teardown is a game I heard about a while ago but wasn’t actively following its development on. Its main gimmick is it’s voxel-based and the gameplay revolves around a destruction engine. Sounded neat! I’ll play it when the game gets some official release.
After the game released in Early Access, I watched some videos of the game in that state, thought they looked cool, but it seemed unpolished; namely in the physics of the destruction. So I held off Early Access and decided to wait for a 1.0 release.
This month, it unexpectedly left early access, so I gave it a try. I was… disappointed, frankly.
The basic gameplay loop of Teardown is you take contracts to either steal things or destroy things; with the challenge being some things are made of materials in varying strength, and other things you’re meant to steal are hooked up to alarms; requiring you to plan out your robbery so you can make a quick getaway. As you progress, you unlock new tools to assist in said-contracts, and earn money to upgrade said-tools.
Stealing things is okay I guess, but it just doesn’t feel right in the kind of game it’s trying to be. The most destruction you do in a heist is making holes in walls to basically brute-force a getaway plan. And when the game introduces heavy objects you have to literally drag to your getaway vehicle, it gets really tedious. But that can all be forgiven if the destruction is good, right?
Well… Okay, the act of breaking things apart is really satisfying, and the game gives a ton of items to do said-breaking. I won’t list them off since they’re considered spoilers in-game, but it’s a wide arsenal and they’re all super fun to use. But my biggest issue is the destruction doesn’t get much deeper than voxels break apart, stronger voxels need stronger tools. There isn’t really much in the way of bending physics, or collateral damage.
If you compare the destruction to a game like Red Faction: Guerilla, the destruction there feels real, because there’s actual physics & collateral. If you destroy all the support points of a building, the whole thing will crumble into dust & rubble. And if a bigger building falls on a smaller building, the smaller building will get crushed under its weight. But in Teardown, this doesn’t happen. Destroying all the support points of a building just kinda… makes it shorter, and it’ll stay one whole mass without really crumbling. It’s really dissatisfying.
Teardown gets a ‘meh’ from me. Destruction is fun, but it’s been done better in other games, and it doesn’t feel like the game’s main focus is destruction at all. If the heisting sounds fun to you, feel free to give it a try. But I couldn’t recommend it.
