While this game is impressive and rarely drops FPS, I cant help but want a better outcome when destroying bases of building etc, its a bit anticlimatic.
Sandbox is fun for a short while, but without unlocks I found myself bored, because to unlock more equipment you have to progress through the campaign mode which is sooo lacklustre, it had potential but it kept doing the same thing again and again, go here and collect these alarmed items and escape with a certain amount or all the items in 60 seconds.

The game is stunning though.

Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this... mansion?

My "calm" moments in my apartment are spent after a day at work, then at the gym, and then sitting down at my computer and booting up whatever game I'm giving my all. While I do that, I like to have a little quiet source of company in the form of a Twitch Stream so I get a little feel that I'm not alone. One of my go-to streamers is Vargskelethor, aka Joel, and if you're a fan of the Vinesauce umbrella you're well aware of who he is. I remember Joel messing around on Teardown and having an issue in one of the latter missions getting a bomb to the detonation site so he could begin a heist. Something about the crazyness of spending all this time on prep and having it go so miserably wrong had me in tears while the chat lambasted his physics skills.

Months and maybe a year even later I found myself with a good computer, one that could finally take on the voxel based goliath that is Teardown. At its core, Teardown is a game about pulling off heists. Most missions start the player at a certain spot with a list of goals they have to accomplish within a minute of time. Not all missions have the timeclock, but most do. The caveat is that this minute doesn't begin to kick until you've begun on your heist, meaning that you have an entire map of prep work to do. Something about this tickled my brain in all the right ways, it allows the player to tailor their experience of the game to how they problem solve. Often in puzzle and mind games, I've felt like the way these problems are to be completed are in the game wants you as the player to do them, rather than applying your own approach. I LOVED the way Teardown allows you to work painstakingly at pulling off a perfect theft. I found myself feverishly and minutely carving out my route between goals in each mission, often doing five or more dry runs to make sure I could get away scot free.

Though the freedom oriented level design is what I would call the "real hero" of Teardown, the physics engine is a walking miracle. In a game with as many assets as this, it's quite hard to make it all work in a way that is conducive to player movement. Just about everything is destructible in some way with the right tools, vehicles like cranes and dump trucks work in the scenarios they should, and gravity feels as good as it can. While the weight of certain vehicles and items were the cause of many a level reset, I felt almost betrayed by how much the physics made sense. Sometimes I wanted to abuse what most games would allow and get a hollow victory, but had to respect the confines of Teardown's engine and whittle myself to a getaway.

Whether its the basic sledgehammer, the iron-man shotgun, or the impactful bombs, the arsenal the player is gifted in Teardown is another excellent touch to what makes it feel like a well oiled machine. You can play as soup to nuts as you want, using items only to make holes in walls and extensions between buildings via planks, or you can get as nifty as you want and use rocket thrusters to literally and metaphorically yeet yourself to victory. Once i unlocked the "Cable" I wondered the entire game what it was for, as I got it fairly early on. It wasn't until the last mission when I realized I could use it to tow a vehicle behind me, a galaxy brain moment that could have made previous missions easier.

Teardown is a lot more than a fun sandbox or a good excuse to blow things up, it's a genuinely enjoyable heist game that makes player agency the key focus. I heavily recommend Teardown as a must play.

A pretty fun destruction sandbox. Too bad they forgot to make an actual game.

Teardown's voxel-based fully destructible environments are impressive (at least on the surface), and the fire propagation and volumetric effects appeal greatly to me, a person who spent a long time messing around with those Falling Sand games... But even in that respect, this is no Noita. See, despite being destructible, the game does not model weight or physics at all, apart from chunks of debris. A giant building will stay standing if there's even one single voxel attaching it to the ground, and even after destroying that, the rest will just drop down undamaged instead of crumbling. Somehow, 14 years later, Red Faction: Guerrilla's Geomod remains undefeated.

But whatever. It's still fun to explode holes in things, and unfortunately, that's not really what most of the actual objectives want you to do.

Almost every mission is just "collect all these items scattered around the map" and when you collect the first one, a 1 minute timer starts. The idea is that you create the ideal path between them, by force, but you'll quickly figure out the 2 or 3 tricks that make most of them trivial. Move objectives closer to each other. Place cars next to them. It really just amounts to a lot of time spent on setup, and then trying and reloading until the physics stop fucking you over -- for a game that requires driving this much, you'd think they would make it so the cars can reliably go up ramps instead of just digging into it with their bumpers.

The most bizarre thing is that for a game focused on destruction, there are very few missions that actually task you with destroying buildings or objects. 90% of them are collecting items or cars, and it gets old fast.

I'll also say the balancing for your tools is pretty strange. It's funny that the shotgun is by far your best option for precision destruction, but it also makes the blowtorch almost immediately irrelevant. Pipe bombs are also damn near useless, and the pistol is too. You get money for upgrading your tools by finding valuables around the maps, so if you've cleaned out the currently available ones and get a new tool, but you've spent your money... Oops! Wait until you unlock a new one, which might be a while! Despite spending 2 years in early access, there are only 9 of them.

The final insult? The "Sandbox" mode, which should be this game's entire reason for existing, does not give you everything to play with. You only have what you've unlocked in the campaign. What were they thinking????

4/10

Another day, another incredible tech demo that has trouble pivoting into an actual game. I want to be clear that this review is just for the campaign of Teardown, which is almost certainly not really the intended focus of the game. From what I played, I can tell that the multiplayer or modded content is where the real fun lies, and the campaign is simply a nice addition from the developers, in case no one else ends up playing or modding the game. To start, there's a lot to like here. If you've ever seen Minecraft with shaders, it strongly resembles this, although Teardown has much smaller voxels. This allows for every object to be interactable or breakable, while still lending itself well to great looking models. While the campaign has a story, it's pretty thin, and comprises of a series of missions with clear cut objectives. You would think that in a game where everything is destroyable, you would have lots of demolition missions, but you will be destroying surprisingly little in your playthrough. I read an interview with the developers where they stated that they created the destructible mechanics first, then found themselves struggling to find gameplay styles that well suited it. In my opinion, they didn't succeed in the final product, as the mission objectives are a baffling collection. Probably 80% or so of them are heist-like, where you have to retrieve a set number of items across the map and escape. While this might seem fun, most of these have a 1 minute timer that begins when you collect the first item, meaning that most levels are about 15 minutes of positioning escape routes and vehicles, followed by a single minute of rushing around. This is fun for some maps, but the sheer number of them are exhausting. They do come up with some differing ideas in the second half of the game, but many of those consist of being shot at by enemies, which might be even less enjoyable. It's a shame these objectives are so poor, because with some slight tweaks this could have been an excellent experience. Well, almost. While I did get used to it, some of the physics are a bit off. From what I can tell, the game only considers a collection of voxels as falling if it is completely separated from the ground. This means that you can have a massive structure standing on a tiny column, and it won't fall. It's not as bad as Minecraft, but again, when you're trying to destroy stuff, it can be frustrating when objects don't obey gravity as expected. As it is, the rating I've given this is mainly due to its potential, as I probably enjoyed myself much less than it would imply.

This is a tough one. On one hand, I love the destruction and mayhem, it's super fun and satisfying. On the other hand, the missions are all time-based and in the vein of a heist. I can see what the game wants you to do. Create a destructive path to complete the 'heist' as quickly as possible. However, due to how many of these types of missions there are it becomes quite repetitive. The game leads with a few levels of just destroying stuff and does sprinkle a few throughout the campaign here and there, and I think there it is at its peak.

But besides the lacking campaign, everything else is literally superb. Visually is fantastic. Well optimized considering the concept. The tools & vehicles feel amazing to use. And the game has good mod support so there's a massive canyon of fan-made content that you can play (some seriously impressive mods).

If I could add one thing, which already sort of roughly exists through mods, I would add NPCs. Whether they're enemies or just civilians, it would breathe a lot more life into the game.
So yeah. Mid campaign, good other-stuff.

long and exhausting for my tastes, but i cannot deny the sheer power here, which is due in part from the length...just when the incredible heists feel like theyre being pushed to their outer limit, part 2 hits u with a much wider variety of creative objectives and concepts. at the heart of it all, besides what a genuinely stunning technical achievement this is, and how consistently stimulating the presented problems are, and how vivid and place-taking the atmosphere can be, is its ability to completely sell a variety of fantasies. heists, stealth, chases, and pure chaotic destruction...all given vividly tangible body thru the world and the tools u use on it. i am definitely not super great at these types of games, but there is nearly unmatched satisfaction to be found here even for me...if this is more yr scene then mine, i can even imagine the riches in store

really fun, super awesome, and one of the most unique approaches to the immersive sim. Voxel design and destructibility go perfectly with that genre, cus I dunno another game that will let you cut down a pillar to make an arch into a ramp. But the first half gets somewhat repetitive with the same objective repeated (steal this. Watch out, it's wired to these alarms so make a path to steal them and escape in 60 seconds). There are some other types of missions, but nothing completely different comes until the 2nd half where it can be a normal stealth mission, or some tornado comes up or this or that happens. More variety in the first half would've been awesome. Now let's pull a second aside to look at the player model choice... you are invisible. You have no player model. Why? Probably so you can self-insert or put in any design you like. Personally, I imagined Teardown Dude as Denzel Washington with a flat cap. What did you imagine teardown dude as? I'd like to know. Please send DM's of what you imagined teardown dude to look like to my discord, jaredleto#6830

Teardown is perhaps the ultimate example of how a game with great mechanics, cool aesthetics and a really unique idea can be utterly destroyed by terrible design and execution. How you can make a game with this concept this mind-numbingly boring and repetitive is beyond me.

3 / 10
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I remember hearing about this one years ago, and thinking that the concept sounded really cool. Being able to destroy literally every single object in a game world sounds awesome. It would be far from the first game to play around with this concept, in fact just last year I played “Perfect Vermin”, a free game which similarly features fully destructible objects which you can blow into increasingly smaller bits with a giant mallet. The big difference being that Perfect Vermin is actually a competent game, instead of a glorified tech demo. Admittedly, the tech that Teardown demos is much more elaborate. However, it’s not much of a video game. I’m really glad that I got it on PS+ for free, if I had paid actual money for this, I’d be pretty miffed, considering it costs something like 30 $/€ normally.

Before I go into anything else in more detail, I will mention that - as of now - I could not bring myself to actually finish this game’s campaign, I dropped it after mission 8 or so. Typically, I wouldn’t feel comfortable writing an actual review/critique about a game I’m only about halfway through, but in this case I feel like it is warranted, since there truly doesn’t seem to be all that much to it beyond what the game presents you with in the first couple of missions. What’s more is that, to be fair, the campaign mode isn’t really what this game is about. At least, that’s what you would assume, based on all the extra modes, but we’ll get to that.

From what I’ve read from interviews with the dev team and other reviewers on various platforms, Teardown’s development started with what ultimately became it’s most recognisable aspect and selling point, the fully destructible environments, and got built up from there. In case you’re unfamiliar, the game uses voxel-based tech similar to Minecraft, only the voxels are way smaller and as such allow for more complexity when you break the game objects up into their individual voxel components. Think of a building made of LEGO that can break up into all the individual pieces, with different materials like bricks, wood or rock having different properties. Now, credit where it’s due, this system works very well - for the most part. The way that individual voxels all break apart and remain as smithereens in the environment, which can themselves be crushed down more and more, is really impressive. The way different materials react to different stimuli is also very well made. The sledge hammer (your starting weapon) can break up wood, glass, dirt and other “softer” materials, while not really doing anything against metal or buildings made of brick and mortar. For that, you’ll need something with more damage potential, like an explosive propane tank, or a big vehicle that you can crash into it, or one of the tools you’ll unlock during your playthrough, ranging from blowtorches and spray cans to rocket launchers and canisters of nitroglycerin. It mostly makes sense, and blowing shit up and watching all the little pieces fly everywhere is very cool. What’s especially impressive is how nicely fire works in this game, how well it spreads by itself, how realistic it looks and just how natural it feels. Teardown also just looks very good in general. The best way to describe it would be something like “Minecraft with shaders”. I’m sure you know what I mean. The lighting is great and the game runs at a very stable 60fps pretty much no matter what’s happening on screen. The background music within the levels is a little… understated, but it’s pretty chill and works well as your typical “music to study to” or whatever.

So, what’s the problem here? If I had to sum up my problems up into a single phrase, it’d be that: Teardown has no idea what kind of game it wants to be. If you haven’t played this game for yourself you might think “What are you talking about? It’s obviously a demolition simulator where you can blow shit up.” Yes, that’s what you would think. But it’s not. In actuality, this game, whose entire mechanical framework is ostensibly built upon destroying objects, is really more of a heist game. And sadly, not a very good one at that. You’re basically playing Thief with destructible environments. This game, whose entire marketing, online-presence and trailers ALL make it seem like this game is primarily about messing around with a pretty advanced physics engine, the game whose name is literally “TEARDOWN” really just wants you to to steal documents or cars. That’s got to be the biggest bait and switch I’ve seen since the days of MGS2, but not in a good way. And this is where I have to come back to what I said before about how the devs started with the physics engine and tried to build their way up from there, because they clearly didn’t really know how to construct an actual game around that concept. Again, you might think to yourself “This doesn’t sound so bad, that sounds kinda fun!” But the problem is less that the devs made a very strange decision to merge two very different game experiences with each other, it’s more that they clearly didn’t know how to design an actually fun heist game in the first place.

The weird thing is, the game’s first mission even starts out with you simply demolishing some building, handing you a couple of tools and letting you go crazy with them. Just try them out. Whenever you’re finished destroying the building you’ve been tasked with, you jump into your escape vehicle. The second mission does the same, with additional objectives thrown into the mix. It’s starting with the third mission that things take a very weird turn. So, up until now you’ve been given basically complete freedom in how to tackle your missions. Take however long you need, do what you want, just get it done. But starting now, the game begins introducing increasingly annoying gameplay elements and rules that run completely antithetical to the experience I just described. For starters, you’re not really tasked with destroying buildings anymore, rather you’re supposed to steal documents, cars, safes, valuables, etc. Very occasionally this also includes raising a building, but - for reasons that will become apparent shortly -this becomes less and less relevant the further the game goes. I realise this is beginning to sound very abstract, so let me give you an example:

A typical Teardown mission will look like this: You’re tasked with stealing 3 documents as your main objectives. Each of these documents are stored in different locations throughout the level, often as far away from each other as possible. Beyond that you typically also have optional objectives, which are mostly just more valuables to steal, let’s say 2 additional documents in this case. The mission takes place within a closed off, but openly designed space, and lets you tackle any objective first if you want to. There is no time limit, and there are no enemy NPCs (as far as I can tell, like I said I haven’t finished the campaign) But here’s the thing: Each and every one of these objects is trapped with a 60 second timer that ends with you getting arrested - and that goes for the whole run. Yes, you have to steal all 3 objects within 60 seconds starting from the first one and get to your escape vehicle before the timer runs out. The alarm cannot be deactivated by any means. The idea here is to utilise your ability to destroy the environment to create an “optimal path”, as it were. Except that all the buildings in most levels are now also equipped with fire alarms, meaning they’re heavily restricting your ability for maximising destruction, subsequently robbing you from what is by far the most entertaining aspect of this game. So you want me to destroy everything.. but not too much? So, what this boils all down to is this: You load into the level, you do nothing but scouting for the first 5 minutes and just study the map on where everything is. Then you go and, with pinpoint precision, create a little path of destruction (but not too much!!) with your frustratingly underpowered tools for usually 15-30 minutes depending on the level only to THEN rush the actual “game” part within 60 seconds. Only, if you made the mistake of not quick saving before actually starting your run, and you make some tiny mistake or the physics decide to fuck you over - and they WILL - you get to do it all over again. Yes, the entire thing. If you actually decided to use the spray paint like a good little boy to mark your optimal path or whatever, guess what, that’s gone too.

I wish I could at least compliment Teardown on being a somewhat decent destruction simulator, but even there I have to qualify my statements a bit. The controls for grabbing and throwing objects don’t work very well and I feel like explosives are way too underpowered. Generally, I’m not sure why this game seems to shun the idea of grand scale destruction for its own sake, but I feel like I’m repeating myself. What’s worst is the fact that any building - literally no matter how much you’ve already destroyed and burned it - will absolutely, categorically refuse to fall over if there’s so much as a single line of voxels forming a pillar still standing. The way the game just switches to Minecraft-physics for this is just jarring. The game already features relatively realistic gravity for any object that is already detached from a larger structure, so I just don’t understand it. It ruins the whole experience - even more than the things I already mentioned.

So the missions aren’t great. The story mode isn’t the only mode this game comes with. What about creative mode? Surely this could salvage this? Maybe, I don’t know. I might know if they didn’t make the harebrained decision to make you unlock both all levels AND tools in the story mode before you got to properly use it. Seeing how I don’t feel compelled to go and play this game’s terrible missions any more than I already forced myself, I guess I’m not qualified to really talk about it. Just when you thought they couldn’t make any more calls like that. I know there are even more aspects to the game, like a co-op mode or something but again, it really isn’t giving me any actual incentive to go and find out.

Ultimately I don’t even really know what else to say about Teardown. It’s a game that should’ve been great, a game all about appeasing that most primal parts of our brains that just want to see things go boom. It’s a game I really wanted to love, I wanted to have a great time with it. But instead, it’s a half-hearted tech demo that is so shockingly bereft of any solid gameplay foundation to stand on that it barely even meets the requirement for me to call it a “video game”.
I really can’t say much more than this: There is potential here, and I hope that the dev team behind it can utilise more of it in the future. If they use the tech from this project and attach it to a game that actually fits it thematically, they could have a hit here. But there is a lot of work to be done. Might just be that they have to (pardon the pun) tear this whole thing down and start from scratch.

Teardown was an incredibly satisfying experience for me once I really got into it. It's a heist game, which I find to be an underexplored genre, with nearly fully destructible environments that you can use to plan and execute your route. As you gain more and more tools and get further in the game (where the missions later become much more interesting), the amount of creativity it allows is great.

I do wish that the time it took to ramp up was not as drastic, I even had to take a break from the game halfway through since the missions were becoming a little repetitive. When I came back and finished the second half though, I had the time of my life. Just a few hours ago I finished a mission where you were meant to transport nitroglycerin carefully to your escape boat, but I didn't feel like lugging it down several flights of stairs so I attached rocket thrusters to it and spent 30 minutes quicksaving and quickloading trying to get the perfect launch angle so it landed directly in the boat. Obviously this was a horrendously inefficient way to complete the objective, but it was fun so it's the way I chose to do it.

Admittedly I think there is a fair misconception that Teardown is a game about simple destruction, which is definitely not the case. Most missions operate on a timer once you complete one of the many objectives after which you must complete the remaining objectives and escape before running out the clock. This is where the planning comes in, which is very often aided by the destruction and the freedom it provides. If you come into the game with the proper expectations, I think it's much easier to tell whether you'll like it or not.

I wasn't wild about the heist/stealth based level design.

Despite this, blowing shit up was always so much fun. Teardown does a great job at giving players multiple sandboxes to play in with tons of tools to use. From a technical level, it's really impressive. Unless I was putting down 1000 nitro bombs (which I did a few times lol), the game ran smooth as butter no matter what I threw at it.

Bonus points for having a mod dlc on console. Some of the mods like the jetpack or the air cannon can really add to the chaos.