Voxels of Mass Destruction.
Armed with a small arsenal of tools, you’ll proceed to your first job; destroying a small home that stands in the way of an expansion to the Evertides Mall. When you show up, there are a few options when it comes to construction vehicles that can certainly fast-track your objective, but push come to shove, you can start to dismantle it the old-fashioned way, with a few well-placed strikes of your sledgehammer. Granted, you’ll need to use the vehicles to tend to some of the harder materials, but the freedom given to Teardown expands into being more than just a destruction simulator. In fact, it might just be the best heist game ever made.
From a videogame standpoint, Teardown has very simple ideas. Across the pretty lengthy campaign and its available expansions and community mods, you’ll steal a series of paintings, drive a few cars into the lake, take pictures of prototype robots, to even steal one to satisfy the needs of your client. The objectives are clear, concise, and largely basic. That said, how you go about completing those missions is where Teardown is a destructive sandbox of equal parts pure freedom and absolute hilarity.
While the visual appearance of Teardown may not be initially impressive, don’t mistake the simplicity of what you see to be that basic at all. Teardown uses voxels to entertain its world and everything you do in it. With ray-tracing baked into the render engine, Teardown looks incredible regardless of the time of day that showers the game in some superb lighting. Even taking in the back half of the campaign with a layer of snow on most of its maps, this game can simply be jaw-dropping for essentially being ‘just a bunch of blocks’.
What helps this game function to adapt as an engaging sandbox is how Teardown uses over a dozen unique voxel materials, each having unique properties of their own. These properties affect gameplay in ways that allow basic concepts to be realized such as wood being able to float, but metal will sink. Granted, there are ways to get around that such as heavy materials having a buoyant shape, but the general thought of ‘that probably won’t float’ is still something you can usually come to rely on. Given there is a lot of water present across most maps, you’ll tend to have to worry about breaking down structures in certain ways depending on if your task is to retrieve something heavy.
With Teardown being available in early access for over two years on PC, a great deal of feedback went into additional content that helps flesh the game out and allow for more mission variety as you progress on. The first half of the campaign has a lot of the same ideas, making for an engaging time for sure, but once you start to take in the later missions, you can see that divide in the quality of the missions at the start and what you experience much later. Your objectives, the mod you can equip, and how the new maps allow for even greater freedom really do start to increase the complexity of the mission and what you are able to take on. This is even more apparent when you start to take in the expansions in Art Vandels and Time Campers, a decent chunk of new missions that are just as fun as the main campaign itself.
Most missions involve you retrieving materials, objects, and vehicles in a set amount of time once you trigger an alarm. While the default is one minute, you can extend that to a full two minutes should you want that extra time. However, while that may sound like missions are bite-sized and largely short, that isn’t the case. I found that most objectives needed anywhere from 20-40 minutes of planning, depending on the map and your familiarity with it. This involves blowing out entire walls, spray-painting a path to follow, planting a vehicle for a faster point A to B, and a variety of other ideas once you start to unlock new tools. Finding the ideal path is part of the fun, as is having your plan end in utter failure.
In fact, most of the ways I was able to decipher what the mission wanted from me was by seeing something unexpected happen or exploring the map to see more of my options. I had a mission where I had to destroy a yacht. Since I had traveled to an island in the middle of nowhere, most of my heavy destruction tools couldn't pass customs, leaving me with a skeleton set of what I normally had. Sure, I had options to work with, but by exploring the island, I found turrets set up that I could pull the boat towards and fire a couple of shots in the bottom of the hull. After that, I found a few speedboats and proceeded to ram them into the open holes the turret made. Before long, the boat sank. Granted, I could have loaded a rowboat with a ton of gas canisters and sunk it that way, but having that freedom and utility available to me, allowed me to complete the mission on my terms.
The variety of what you can do here is pretty staggering when you open yourself to taking in all your options. That said, you do have a finite amount of tools, ammo for said tools, and the vehicles that are around you, as they can break down and become useless, but you almost have an endless supply of alternatives should something not work or go wrong. And with the ability to lay down a quick save, you can experiment in the middle of a task to fuck around and find out, especially as one wrong move can trigger a timer and place the heist in motion, having you in a panic to see what you can do on the fly and under pressure.
One annoyance that didn’t quite sit well with me was that a single voxel can support the entire weight of a building and prevent gravity from truly working as intended. While there are PC mods that can address this, I had a mission where I had to destroy a diner. I had destroyed every last wall to have it collapse, but one single metal bar was holding up the entire building. As I am not a developer or engineer in the slightest, I don’t know if the added calculations to making this work as a default option would have been a headache to ensure performance, but it was something that constantly made me rethink certain levels of destruction, especially as removing that bar then had the building naturally sink into the rubble below. Did this ruin my time with Teardown? No, but it was something I still wanted to address in this review.
While you’ll tend to operate without much resistance, other than the alarm timers, there are a few instances where you’ll be under fire by attack helicopters. This is where the game lost me for a few missions. Teardown is set up wonderfully to be a destruction simulator ‘slash’ heist game, but it is not set up to be a shooter or a game where you are given the tools to effectively survive hostile encounters. As you approach low health, your movements are drastically slow and awkward, making it next to impossible to escape once your health bar has been cut to shreds. There are menu settings to increase your health, but not enough to make your defeat any less infuriating. One mod that I strongly suggest turning on is the jet pack as it helps you avoid paths that result in the helicopter being able to systematically destroy you.
The real appeal of Teardown comes with using the tools you have to demolish, destroy, or alter the world around you to serve the needs of the mission. While your trusty sledge will always be by your side, you’ll have bombs, shotguns, rocket launchers, and a blowtorch, to applying cables to connect and pull extremely heavy objects. While teardown can have the appearance of being a puzzle game, some missions can result in the same ideas used to pull off your missions, thus preventing you from really thinking too hard on something, especially as you get familiar with the maps as many are used several times over. That said, the back half of the campaign takes place later in the year, allowing locations to change in small ways, but enough to make them really stand out. This is apparent in seeing the diner that I once destroyed slowly start to be rebuilt. This was a nice touch that shows the continuity of my efforts spread out across the story.
The story itself moves around a few different clients, often having you one-up them or get revenge for a task they don’t know you were actually involved in. The petty rivalries are quite humorous to take in and do allow the game to have a consistent through-line of why you are returning to the same locations over and over again. White the Time Campers DLC’s story isn’t anything too great, it still serves a purpose in explaining why you are using a time car to go back in time to address the needs of a mysterious camper.
Across the campaign, you’ll have your home base. This might be one of the best ways that progress has been shown to me in a game in several years. When you begin your journey, you’ll work out of a large empty building that is in desperate need of repairs. Once you start to wrap up the campaign, it’ll be a lush family home that shows just how prosperous your business truly has been. It’s a remarkable sense of progress to see that empty structure become this fully furnished mansion, complete with a transformation outside its walls as well. Do I wish I had some input in the rooms, layout, and design? Sure, but I still appreciate what Tuxedo Labs has given us here.
Teardown has a ton of content available at launch, a culmination of missions that have been part of the game’s growth out of early access. The main campaign is a series of around 40 missions with the Art Vandels DLC as well as the Time Campers DLC being available. While Art Vandels is part of the standard package, Time Campers is available through the season pass or as part of both the Deluxe Edition and the Ultimate Edition as the latter includes the season pass. Each offers a ton of new missions, new tools, and new maps, such as Time Campers taking you back in time to rely heavily on dynamite while avoiding security in the way of hot air balloon guards. I would say that if you are intent on taking in everything Teardown has to offer, the Ultimate Edition is the one to get as it includes the season pass already.
Teardown is a game built with creativity and destruction working hand in hand to offer you a sandbox in which you’ll easily lose hours in. I do have a few issues to nitpick, such as some of the platform elements not always working, the fact that every time I autosave I cannot move forward for a few seconds, to the occasional performance dips that can cause the game to chug right along for a few seconds. Considering this is a game that could really test your PC hardware, I am impressed with the work that Sabre Interactive and Tuxedo Labs have done here to make this work on current-gen consoles, especially the Series S. If you are interested in the idea of a heist game built around a completely destructible world, then Teardown may satisfy you in ways that you likely are not expecting. It can sometimes have issues that can get in the way of your enjoyment, but once you understand what the game wants from you, no structure is safe from a complete and utter demolishing.
Developer - Tuxedo Labs, Saber Interactive. Publisher - Saber Interactive. Released - November 15th, 2023. Available On - Xbox Series X/S, PS5, PC. Rated - (T) Drug Reference, Fantasy Violence, Mild Language.
Platform Reviewed - Xbox Series X. Review Access - A review code for the game as well as its DLC was provided by the publisher for the purpose of this review.
Jeff is the original founder of Analog Stick Gaming. His favorite games include The Witcher III, the Mass Effect Trilogy, Hi-Fi Rush, Hellbade: Senua’s Sacrifice, and the Legend of Heroes series, especially Trails of Cold Steel III & IV.