Teardown | PC Review
Voxels Go Boom
Teardown is a game of layers…and those layers can be blown away with shotguns, explosives, and heavy machinery! Made by Tuxedo Labs, Teardown’s mission is to give you, the player, as much freedom as you can stand to experiment in a world that’s yours to destroy. However, as a game with layers, the end product can be a bit more complicated than that.
At its core, Teardown is a game about destroying stuff, and it gives you plenty of tools to do that. The campaign gradually unlocks various means of destruction as you progress, including demolition tools like a hammer and concentrated explosives, to kinetic weapons like a pistol, shotgun, and bazooka. You’ll also find vehicles and heavy machinery to either drive around or cause havoc, and with a fully destructible environment, there will be much havoc.
Humble Beginnings
The way Teardown presents itself at first is with you, the player, in charge of a self-run demolition company tasked with knocking down buildings. However, the campaign quickly converts to a heist simulator as you’re offered less than legal jobs to infiltrate places and steal things. And while Teardown gives you plenty of tools to get the job done, the more criminal missions in the campaign trend away from the freedom Teardown initially promises.
Here’s how it works: You’re dropped in an area, tasked with stealing various macguffins. After the first couple missions, those macguffins are all attached to alarms, meaning taking anything will start a countdown timer, at the end of which you’ll be caught. So you have to grab all the required macguffins (and the optional ones, if you’re ambitious) and reach your getaway vehicle, all in under a minute.
This is the puzzle: how do you nab everything and get away in the time allotted? You have unlimited time to scout the area, knock down walls to provide shortcuts, and stash vehicles where you need them to get around the map faster, but once that timer starts, there’s nothing to do but run and hope you planned your heist correctly.
Counter-Intuitive
And that, ultimately, is where Teardown works against itself. The game promises creative freedom in solving the puzzle of “how do I steal stuff and get away with it,” but the time limit means many missions have very limited options in terms of snatching everything and reaching your car in time. You can always go into the options to adjust the timer length to make it more forgiving, but there’s no way to get rid of it entirely.
However, that’s just the campaign. While a big part of the game, it’s not its biggest part. That would be the sandbox and modding community, and the developers made sure to embrace the heck out of the latter. There is some absolutely bonkers stuff out there to play around with, and if you’re the kind of gamer who enjoys a good sandbox and has ever asked the question “how much C4 does it take to knock down a bell tower?” Teardown answers that question with a resounding “Yes, and…?”
Teardown is currently available on PC for $20 USD, and as a free destruction simulator, it works very well. Its campaign can be repetitive and limiting, but outside of that, the sheer joy of watching the world explode around you can be highly addictive.
This review is based on a PC copy of Teardown provided by Vicarious PR for coverage purposes. As of the time of this writing, it is exclusive to this platform.
Teardown
$19.99
Pros
- A Completely Destructible Environment
- Creative Freedom in Puzzle Solving
- Very Mod-Friendly
Cons
- Campaign Gets Repetitive
- Not Much Content if You’re Not Interested in Sandbox Mode
