Teardown Review - Came In Like A Wrecking Ball

Everything the light touches in Teardown is primed for you to destroy. Whether it's heavily plastered brick walls or fragile wooden sheds, Teardown gives you a variety of tools to make blowing up each little pixel a delight as you tear your way through its handful of carefully crafted playgrounds. It's a game filled with inventive ideas and a satisfyingly simple premise--even if it is hampered down by a campaign that suffers from poor pacing. Its premise, thankfully has enough depth to it that makes Teardown a destructive sandbox toy that is enticing to return to frequently.

Acting as a highly sought-after demolitions expert, your journey through Teardown's campaign takes you across the game's nine maps and peppers them with a variety of objects that drive its mayhem. You're mostly going to carry out intricate heists, although the criteria for success does change from mission to mission. One might challenge you to steal several computers that are all hooked up to an alarm system, while another revolves around destroying a variety of expensive cars by finding ways to dump them in water. Mostly, however, the objectives supplement a familiar pattern of play: Create a route through the map using your destructive tools so that you can carry out the heist before the alarms that you will trigger summon security to your position. Your limited movement speed and the labyrinthine maps ensure that you can't just brute force your way to a solution without carefully thinking about the route you're making between objectives, while the tools at your disposal methodically limit your options to create engaging environmental puzzles to solve.

Your ability to destroy each stage is limited by the tools you have. You start with just a sledgehammer and fire extinguisher, making it easy to break through wooden doors and put out fires but limiting your ability to charge through brick walls. As you progress, you unlock more powerful tools and weapons, including explosives, rocket launchers, shotguns, and pipe bombs. Each one has a limited number of uses, forcing you to carefully consider how you're utilizing each one in the context of your objective. It's consistently entertaining to just blow holes through walls with a shotgun or bring down a small office a few floors with well-placed explosives or map-specific construction vehicles, with Teardown's superb physics letting you carry out your delicate planning with consistent and repeatable results.