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.