Teardown Review

Destruction-based games are brilliant. When I say that, I don’t necessarily mean the quality of the campaign, I mean the sheer potential and fun they offer. Red Faction: Guerrilla sticks in my mind as a game that did destruction incredibly well, allowing you to topple towers in physics-based fun. Teardown looks to continue that genre, to allow it to move forward in a new generation and make a whole new world of fans, but does it succeed?

Teardown was released in early access back in October 2020 and has just this month been released as a full game. It’s voxel-based and as such isn’t the most graphically taxing game, but the sheer amount of explosions and destruction you can have going at any one time can certainly cause the game to chug at times. It’s rare and only happens in extreme circumstances, but if you have a lower-end gaming PC or laptop then I’d recommend double-checking your specifications.

The tools provided to you by the game itself are actually unlikely to cause frame-drops, but it’s the mods you’re going to end up inevitably installing that’ll do it for you. Once I beat the main campaign I downloaded several mods that added new objects and levels, ranging from a Katana to a bigger gun.

Teardown does have a campaign, but the campaign only lasts for around four to five hours. It’s not really a complaint so much as a note because the entire campaign is an incredible amount of fun and has a huge range of mission goals ranging from stealing a series of computers to destroying a building for a rival contractor, so you’re not going to get bored here.

Once the campaign is done you also have a series of challenges you can try out as well as multiple different sandbox environments for you to destroy. Hunted mode tasks you with picking up as many targets as possible that are fully randomized while avoiding a guard helicopter, Mayhem is all about destroying as much as possible in one minute, and Fetch is about getting to as many targets as possible and escaping before time runs out. 

Plot-wise it's very bare-bones, an extremely basic story involving a police officer getting you to help with her investigation. It's not exactly going to win awards, but it does what it's supposed to by getting you from point to point.

One of the most beautiful things about Teardown is that it’s very physics-based. You can take out supports from a building and watch the entire building come crumbling down on top of you, or take out specifically a certain part of a bridge so that you can watch it struggle to take the weight of any vehicle that might happen to go across it. It’s not AS physics-based as something like the aforementioned Red Faction: Guerrilla, you won’t see that level of destruction in this engine. But that doesn’t really matter too much, not when you’ll be having so much fun with it.

Combining this with the tools given to modders means that there’s a lot here. There’s a fully realized Boeing-747 map and a full physics-enabled map of the Hoth invasion from The Empire Strikes Back. Mods provide new weapons with massive amounts of destruction capabilities, new maps, and basically everything you can want from a game in the workshop. I can only imagine this getting even more insane over the coming months, especially now that the game has left early access.

Personally, I’d love to see brand-new maps released over the coming months from the developers, though I do understand that they probably want a break right now. Still, if they keep supporting this game then there’s really no reason to not pick up this game, especially considering how cheap it is.

Teardown Review | Final Thoughts

While Teardown might have a relatively short campaign, it more than makes up for the length with sheer potential. The sandbox mode is an utter delight, something that you could play for hours and hours. There are so many potential modding capabilities here that the game could have an extremely long lifespan, the type of experience we’ll be talking about for years to come. I honestly cannot recommend the game enough to anybody with even a passing interest, especially given how well it runs and the number of options you’re given in-game.

TechRaptor's review of Teardown was conducted on PC with a copy provided by the publisher.