Graphics Aren't Everything - Destruction in Teardown is a Revelation!

It was supposed to be a short, fleeting date. Just a quick dinner, after which we were supposed to go our own ways. However, the game had other plans for me – for the next four hours, we were blowning up voxels and having a great time. That's how I would describe my adventure with Teardown, or what I personally call the inverse of Minecraft. Instead of building, we focus on destroying!

Fantastic destruction!

I must admit that I was somewhat apprehensive of a game about destroying stuff. What could be interesting about it in the long run? The slogan "realistic physics" sounded encouraging, but can you base your entire game on something like that? I thought that you can't, but Teardown quickly proved me wrong! It was enough to pack all this destruction within the framework of a logical game, season it a little vibe of crookedness, and throw in a lot of freedom.

The story campaign takes us to different parts of the world in order to perform specific orders. Each time, we have to obtain or destroy something, taking into account the limitations that add variety to the fun. Sometimes it's important to avoid starting a fire, and other times it's necessary to escape before the police arrives. However, we always have some tools at our disposal and can use everything that is present at a given stage. And it is the use of the environment that's Teardown's mainstay!

Each task can be performed in a number of ways, and we are limited mostly by our imagination. The voxel world has been designed in such a way that, at times, you really have to rack your brains to deal with the challenge in a clever way. Why blow up a wall when you can ram it with a car? Why waste time going down the staircase if you can run down the excavator arm you've just placed there. You don't have to destroy a wooden building yourself – a fire will take care of that. The key is preparation – I bet that speedrunners will love it here.

However, to make all of these acts of destruction meaningful, the campaign also has a crazy storyline that begins with a simple urge to pay the bills. In one job, we get entangled in a crazy story full of explosions, frauds and illegal activities. These are the perfect excuses to break stuff and employ your grey matter. Most importantly, the creators of Teardown do not hide that their production is little more than just a fantastic physics simulator that's great for demolishing the environment – they just give us plenty of reason to test it.

It was a beautiful blast indeed, and one of my first!

Destruction on your own terms

Nothing prevents you from focusing on playing with realistic physics. That's why a sandbox mode with optional challenges has been made available, where we can indulge in destruction to our hearts' content. Of course, you'll need to complete the campaign to access all the maps and tools. Sandbox, in turn, is a playground for experimenting with the possibilities of the game itself. Thanks to it, I quickly found out that sometimes you can achieve better results by acting more subtly. Although I must admit that I mostly used for blowing up stuff in a spectacular way.

When boredom begins to bleed in among the ruins, mods created by the Teardown community come to the rescue. Some of them are just goofy visual things, but others add, for example, an even more realistic model of damage. Thanks to it, destruction becomes even more spectacular, but also resource-consuming – so be careful what mods you upload, because it may turn out that your PC will not like it as much as mine.

That door was like that all along, I swear!

Minecraft RTX, but no building?

Teardown's voxel world is not hyperrealistic. It's not cutting-edge graphic capabilities of modern hardware, but the whole thing works like a charm. The explosions are spectacular, and the blocks flying in all directions make you feel satisfied. After a few hours of fun in the story campaign and in the sandbox mode, I started to call Teardown this a "Minecraft RTX," but without building. The RTX is here for a reason, because the lighting in this game also delivers.

Then, I was positively surprised with optimization. For the amount of things on the screen – explosions, fires, falling objects – Teardown didn't stutter one bit. I did not notice any major FPS drops on my several-year-old computer, and I'd been afraid that it might not be so rosy in this respect. However, it's worth taking into account that it's still quite a demanding game when it comes to system requirements. Especially when you plan to use mods.

A modern drawbridge.

Teardown doesn't revolutionize the gameplay in any way, being more of a milestone in the use of realistic physics in games. I love such creative experiments, because they often inspire new games in a number of ways. It's an Early-Access project, so I can't wait to see what the creators have in store in the full-fledged release. There's so much content now that the game already yields several explosive hours of fun. So, if you need to blow something up, get Teardown right away!