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
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