Teardown

Is a heist game what you'd really want out of a destruction sandbox? Because that is what Teardown is, but thankfully you have options.

Teardown generated some buzz before it's release, being this fascinating, voxel game experience that was perfect for short gifs and videos showing off the destruction capability. Most levels are built out of objects made by voxels with various materials to form a pixelated representation of real world objects while the stages uses realistic lighting and water bodies. The materials of these voxels determine how destructible it is from your influence. While a few materials like rock and heavy metal are completely indestructible, others like wood can be burn and set aflame and cause chain reactions. Your starting sledgehammer can breakdown weaker structures, but guns and explosives get through stronger materials, and the blowtorch can burn things and cut some metal. The combination of systems and visuals in Teardown makes for a game more "realistic" than Minecraft, allowing for amusing destruction reactions. Though there are still "floating voxel" scenarios. Other world systems include fire on flammable materials, which can be put out with the fire extinguisher that sprays a cloud of foam that will probably challenge your CPU, semi-realistic bodies of water, buildable wooden planks used to make personal bridges, protect objects, or tether objects to other structures. Some objects are connected to alarms in certain stages that will alert security to your presence and give you 60 seconds to complete your objective and escape before a mission failure.

Teardown is two different products. The first being a traditional campaign, having you take the role of a demolitionist in a failing demolition company, being convinced to take jobs of destroying and stealing other owner's properties, managing the combined systems and destruction of the gameworld mentioned before escaping after committing gradually more felonious crimes. The second being voxel destruction toy in the form of Challenge Mode, Sandbox, Cheats, and Mods.

Stages are reused for multiple campaign missions, meaning each mission will have a variation in some objects or alarms. Every stage allows you unlimited time to explore and plan your heist. Usually there's an alarm that can be triggered, such as fire alarm after flames reach a certain density in the stage, water alarms when an item is wet, or usually theft alarms when an object is disconnected from a sensor. You gradually earn new tools able to be used in future and previously completed missions for better scores, which unlocks more missions. Completing missions and finding valuables give you money used to upgrade your tools.

The Teardown campaign is more of a puzzle solving and strategic planning experience than a mindless (or mindful) environment for destroying things. You may find yourself either bored or uninterested in finding a clever way to steal random cars and safes for a customer that amounts little more than an avatar with text on a computer screen. The campaign isn't bad, but it isn't what alot of players was expecting, and many do not find it fun.

Thankfully, Teardown gives you the option to subvert this. You can easily "enable cheats" to unlock all the stages and items and play Challenge Mode and Sandbox. Challenge mode is mostly for your own amusement, or to compare scores with friends allowing you to steal items in a certain amount of time or destroy as much of the stage you can in 60 seconds (in which the timer starts after the destruction of 1000 voxels, giving you some leeway to plan your destruction). Sandbox allows you to roam the levels with few restrictions - your "weapons" have unlimited uses, and you don't have to worry about alarms. You still have a health bar, but you can respawn shortly after death with no penalty.

Sandbox mode is the best way to experience Teardown, especially with mods. Mods are lightweight in size, and are easy to get addicted to searching and trying out, including new maps, new tools, and spawnable objects. Think of a weapon, tool, weather effect or spell from another game, comic or movie, and it is probably in the Steam Workshop: grappling hooks, jetpacks, lightsabers, black holes, Rocket Launchers, Guns, Portal Guns, Physics Guns Tanks, AC-130s, Nuclear Bombs, the HE Blade from Metal Gear Rising Revengence to sling waves of energy through the entire map or an Omnicutter that does about the same thing, but you can paint a shape of what it cuts or fall back to a Railgun that shoots a simple, big hole through whatever it passes and loads more. Teardown's "Modability" allows the potential for infinite ways to create and destroy voxels. However, there is no end goal to this, and this only serves to play around with destruction, which can lose its appeal very quickly. You've destroyed the voxel replica of an airplane, Titanic ship, or big city? Now what? Do it again with other tools I suppose. This does mean the fun of Teardown is limited to your own imagination and ability to find the fun of breaking things for "breaking things sake" and no other reward, outside of recording it for video or live streaming. Furthermore, unlike Minecraft and similar building games, making tools, objects and maps all require outside software, making modding of Teardown a true time investment much like a Bethesda RPG or Garry's Mod.

Teardown is a tool for self-amusement. The "game" part of it won't be entertaining for everybody, but the Sandbox part of can be if you invest the time.