Teardown

Did I get this because I was bored and it was on sale? Perhaps.

Teardown is a voxel-based demolition/heist simulator. While running a demolition business, you’re low on cash and take on a sketchy job; before you know it, you’re caught between infighting millionaires and the police. At least you get to set things on fire and drive through the carnage in dump trucks. If nothing else, this game knows its audience.

Each “heist” has a variety of objectives and optional goals – in most missions, you have 60 seconds from the moment you collect the first objective to the time the police arrive. Your job, then, is to get all the non-alarmed objectives out of the way and then create a path between the remainder that you can traverse in under 60 seconds – with the understanding that practically anything in your way can be destroyed with a sledgehammer or construction equipment. While I’m sure it’s possible, the 60 second time limit can feel limiting when you need to cross a large area and just want to do something cool rather than something efficient. Nevertheless, it has a remarkable amount of potential (imagine Payday crossed with a bit of Minecraft), and I’m looking forward to figuring out each mission – even if there do seem to be a limited number of maps (supplemented by a Steam workshop).

That being said, this game is quite resource intensive – I had to turn things pretty far down before it ran at a reasonable framerate, and it still wasn’t as smooth as I would have liked. For a game made of small blocks, that’s quite something. Admittedly, it has crazy postprocessing and everything has physics which I’m sure has something to do with it.

Tier Two for now, and hopefully the recognition it’s gotten on Steam will mean that there are plenty of missions in the final version.

Steam link