Teardown: Where there's a will, there's a way

Now *that* is a lighthouse!

Hello there, readery-doos! You might have heard us mention it here and there, and it's finally time! We've played through Teardown and all it's (current) DLC, and we've got some thoughts to share!

But first, if you aren't aware of this game, a little rundown:

Teardown is a voxel-based game centred around destructible environments. With the right tools, just about anything on the game's maps can be razed to the ground. (The ground itself being just about the only thing that *isn't* destructible)

It's a game where you can turn a scene like this:

..... into this!

It takes some doing, but it certainly can be done.😉

As you might expect from a game like this, it's got a sandbox mode to play around in, and it's a modder's nirvana with a gazillion entries on the workshop page.

But interestingly, Teardown actually has a story-driven campaign, where you're given various objectives that'll invite you to...... get creative with how you solve them.

And it's that which we were interested in, so fair warning, no mods today, and only a bit of sandbox stuff for screenshots. We're mostly just focused on the campaign and DLCs.

In fact, let's get right into that and talk about....

The story campaign

So, in the campaign, you have a "hub area", so to speak, Löckelle Teardown Services HQ. You come here between missions to find new tools that get dropped off as you level up (which you do by completing objectives).

It doesn't start out looking like this. In fact, the hub area tells it's own little part of the story by gradually changing as you progress through the campaign.

There's two main attractions: You have a TV where you can watch the news and get some after-the-fact context for your missions, and you have your PC, where you read messages from the various mission givers, upgrade your gear and indeed, start missions. Each mission is replayable anytime, by the way.

The story is a humorous little affair where basically, your demolishing company gets roped into some shady business, and as you develop a bit of a reputation, various people start hiring you to screw each other over, without realizing that you're working for their rivals, too.

This gives some context for the 40 Missions the main campaign takes place over. Some of them are straight-up demolition jobs...

Others might involve things like stealing some cars or sinking some stuff in the ocean..... or both, in one case!

There's generally a pleasant variety of different objectives, though one theme stays consistent through most missions. You see, In most of the missions, as soon as you complete an objective, the alarm goes off.

At this point, you have 60 seconds to complete the other objectives (some are mandatory, some optional), and get to your escape vehicle before you're caught and the mission fails.

So in essence, the gameplay loop for most missions goes like this:

1, Explore the map, check objectives and plan your approach.

2, Prepare an efficient route between your objectives. Just running between them is going to be too slow, so blow holes in walls to create shortcuts, put planks to create bridges between rooftops, park vehicles in strategic positions so you can use them to cover distance or transport heavy objects, and all kinds of other shenanigans. Get creative.

And 3, execute your plan. Basically, every mission ends with a speedrun where you see if your ideas work out.

Those 60-second timed runs at the end are so inviting that we simply couldn't resist the temptation to make some shorts of them! Which means that you could watch our videos on the game to get an idea of what that all looks like in action:

It's pretty frantic, and quite good fun.

There's a decent variety of objectives like we said, but also, at times, the game shakes up the formula by having "live threats" in the level, like patrolling guard robots or indeed, a helicopter, actively searching for you. Fear not, getting spotted is never a failure state, but you'll have to dodge some bullets.😉

In those missions, it's not necessarily about preparation and a frantic run at the end, but instead the game feels more like a normal stealth affair, except you have opportunities to Macgyver up some interesting solutions to your problems on the spot.

Oh, also, in any and all missions, you can quicksave and quickload. The only time you can't save (from what we've found) is when that 60-second-alarm timer has been triggered.

But yeah, overall, for a game that's generally focused on the concept of destructible environments, it has to be said, these devs did a great job giving you a fair bit of variety in objectives, variations of the game's formula, and general opportunities to not only get creative, but to use your creativity in practical ways.

This variety goes into the details, too. You see, what actually triggers the alarm and starts the timer in most missions are alarm boxes that are tied to the objectives with a cable. The alarm doesn't actually trigger until that cable snaps.

Now, this isn't always an option, but we've found that sometimes, those alarm boxes are in turn tied to something that could feasibly be moved, like a container, or some kind of server unit.

So you could get extra-creative and say, maneuver a couple of objectives into more advantageous positions before you actually set off the timer.

Or even do stuff like blowing a hole in the floor, then using that very alarm cable itself to carefully dangle the object down so you can grab it from the level below. Doesn't always work, since the cable might not be long enough, or the object might be too heavy to hang from the cable. But you can see how the game encourages thinking outside the box.

In one of the DLCs, we even had a mission that involved stealing stuff contained in wall-mounted lockboxes. Damaging a lockbox would trigger the alarm. But "dismounting" the lockboxes from the wall wouldn't, in this case.

So we cut all the lockboxes off the walls, gathered them all up in one place, blew them all up with a single explosive like an objective-filled piñata, gathered up the stuff and casually escaped.

You can see how the game lets you run free with your ideas. No need to feel guilty about creating or exploiting shortcuts, either. That's kind of the whole point.

And the huge multitude of ways to approach each mission in this game is really stunning, when you give it some thought.

There's never just one solution. In fact, since you can complete the objectives in any order, there's just about infinite ways to tackle each mission. Seriously, watch some other people's videos and compare them to ours, and you'll see what we mean.

So, the campaign is pretty well designed. But of course, with a game like this, a lot of the enjoyment comes from how good and robust the engine is on a technical level, which limitations it presents you with and how well it runs. So, let's talk about that!

The engine and mechanics

So, we've already showed off a couple of pictures taken in sandbox mode, where all of your tools have unlimited uses/ammo. (Unlike campaign, where most of your tools have limited ammo. It's one of the things you can upgrade.)

We're just mentioning this to let you know that while in Teardown, you can fill up an entire building with nitroglycerin containers and blow it sky-high, you won't be doing quite that much damage in any of the missions.

...but as you can see, the sandbox mode is a lovely way to really test out the game's destruction physics.

And yeah, it's impressive. Different materials react differently to your various tools, like your sledgehammer only really being effective against wood, glass, plaster and whatnot, or metal being particularly susceptible to the blowtorch.

Explosives basically rip through anything, but the size of the hole depends on the explosive used and the material you're blowing up. And so does the size of the debris!

If you're blasting a hole in a wooden wall, you can expect it to splinter into a million tiny, flaming pieces, whereas blasting through a solid concrete or brick wall is gonna leave large chunks lying about. Not a problem if you're just looking to create screenshots for your blog of course, but campaign missions, where you're trying to create shortcuts, you'll often want to clear the debris out of the way, because you might be planning on driving a car through the hole you just blasted, for instance.

Don't get us wrong, you *could* always just ram a car straight through the wall without preparing a hole, or just blast a hole without clearing the debris, but that'll slow you down, and with a bit of bad luck, something might get snagged and throw you off course, or even roll you on your roof or some such. Not usually what you want in your speedy 60-second escapes.😉

Speaking of cars...

The vehicle physics are surprisingly solid for a game like this. They feel weighty and satisfying, there's a pretty large variety of vehicles all over the maps/missions and you can use them in all sorts of ways.

The damage model is a bit curious. They use the same voxel-destruction physics as any other object in the world, but vehicles are their own, self-contained objects, with a health bar that goes down as they lose voxels. When the health bar reaches 0, the engine is broken and it won't go anymore. Curiously, vehicles cannot seem to be "removed" from the game world, so even if you try to completely atomize a vehicle, a sort of basic skeletal frame will always remain, which you can even still "get into", though of course the condition will be zero and it won't drive.

Many vehicles have special features you can use, like the forks on a forklift or the arm on a crane. There's a couple of vehicles that actually have weapons on them (a tank destroyer and a little MRLS truck), and there's some pretty big boats to play with, too!

And speaking of playing with things, there's another standout feature in this game. Because in no other game is it so much fun to play..... with fire.😎

Let us show you what we mean. See, here we have a little collection of cabins, built on stilts on the water. As you can see, we just went into each cabin and started a little fire with our blowtorch.

Well, fires spread. So quite soon, it started reaching the outside of the cabins. By the way, just about everything around here is flammable, including the supports and the pier!😉

Yeah, the fire spread pretty vigorously, here. The soundscape was pretty cool too, with the sizzling and crackling of the fire, and the occasional *plop* sound as something detached and dropped into the water below.

Aaaand there it goes, spreading onto the pier. A proper inferno, at this point!

In the end, it spread all the way to where we were standing and we had to whip out the extinguisher to defend ourselves. Also, miraculously, neither of the boats caught fire! Buuut you can see what happened to the cabins. And all that just from starting a couple of tiny fires!

So yeah, fire is pretty cool in this game. And so is the smoke! Look at this:

See how the smoke drifts up and forms a dense cloud around the ceiling? This plucky little physics sandbox probably has some of the best smoke effects around. Take that, "AAA"-games!😜

So the gameplay and mechanics are quite good and solid. But there's a couple of limitations we'd like to talk about, too.

For one, it'd be an easy assumption to make that, with this being a voxel-based game about using tools and destroying stuff, you can of course, dig and make tunnels.

Buuuut you can't.

Ground level is always a set foundation. You can sometimes destroy things like the asphalt layer of the road or some turf, but once you get through that, you hit an indestructible wall. Or er, floor, rather.

You can always tell when this happens with buildings, too. If you completely raze a building to the ground, you'll find yourself looking at something like this:

A sort of foundational plinth.

Oh, and to the right, you can also see some of that broken asphalt layer we mentioned.

But yeah, there's no digging below those foundations or the solid ground layer of the map, except for those cases when buildings actually have basements and such, but there, you'll find solid rock walls beyond the basement façade.

So that's one limitation the game presents you with. There's another notable one though, and it's the one thing we *don't* like very much about this game.

Let us show you an example. So, here we are, blowing up a building, as one does:

And specifically, we're actually quite deliberately blowing up all the static elements like walls, beams etc. Anything that bears weight and holds up the roof.

So here's our gripe: While Teardown does simulate many material attributes like weight, resistance to various forms of damage, etc., it does not dynamically simulate weight distribution or loadbearing capability. As a result, you get situations this:

So all of the walls are gone, as are any other structural elements. By all means, this structure should have collapsed about halfway through this operation, but here it is, practically hovering.

Why? Because in the red circle, if you look closely, you can see that we've left a piece of window intact. Not even a metal frame or something, nono, literally a couple of centimetres of glass.

The entire rest of the structure refuses to become a dynamic physics object and collapse as long as there's even a single voxel connecting it to it's foundation.

As soon as you destroy that glass, the whole top half of the building will collapse down like you'd expect.

We're not saying it's an unreasonable limitation, to be fair. If the game had to make proper calculations for static support, weight distribution and all that, we're guessing that most normal consumer hardware probably couldn't run it anymore. During some of the *really* big demolition work we did for some of the pictures here, the framerate already suffered a bit, so yeah, we get why this is a thing.

And it's not something that comes up all too often, especially if you're already aware of this limitation and know to plan around it. Still, it's a bit of a bummer when you think you've convincingly blown up a building, only to find it remaining upright because of a random bit of plaster somewhere that's still technically intact.

So yeah, that's our one gripe with the gameplay. However, there's another area where the game surprisingly really shines!

The graphics

See, we're normally not into voxel-y block-y graphics, nowadays. It's turned into a bit of an overdone look in indie games, we feel.

To be fair though, Teardown does it's own thing with it. For one, the character models, vehicles and such don't stand out like a sore thumb by using a different design style. Everything you see is uniformly made from the same, small voxels, and it forms a very cohesive image.

And beyond that, this game does some pretty amazing things with lighting, fog/smoke, and the colour palette. It's an incredibly atmospheric looking game. Lookie:

The weather effects, the muted colour palette, the way that explosions look like the birth of a new sun, the slight, gentle blooming glow around every light source and some rather pleasant depth of field effects all play together to make this a genuinely very pleasant game to look at.

It's strengths are more in style than the raw graphical power. Like most good-looing games, actually. Don't need a 8090GTXX TI Super Mega edition with half a terabyte of vram if the developers actually understand what makes things look good.😜

And inevitably, after talking about graphics, we'll follow up by talking about....

The sound

They say a good sound stage is one you don't notice, because if you *do* notice it, it's probably because something's wrong.

Well, in Teardown, happily, you don't notice it much, because everything sounds just the way you'd want it to. Chunky impacts, nice ambient sound (Both musical and otherwise), and satisfying little ticks and tocks from various gameplay and UI interactions. Really nice.

Oh, but there -are- two things that really do stand out:

The first one you hear the second you open the menu.

..... what a cool theme, man.

The second one we're not going to show you, because it's the credits theme. It doesn't have spoilers or anything (in fact, the lyrics are gibberish), but frankly, we want you to play this game and earn that theme. It feels pretty special.😜

...... or just go and look it up. It's called "Löckelle" by Douglas Holmquist. But be warned, it *will* get stuck in your head.😉

There's even a little mini-remix of that credits theme for two of the DLCs! Speaking of which....

The DLC

So Teardown, at the time of writing, has 4 DLCs, and we played and finished all of 'em! So, let us share our thoughts on each one. First, we've got....

Art Vandals

Okay, so this one comes free with the game. It's a short little mini-campaign that takes place across a single, versatile map.

It's got some decent missions, and it gets some bonus points because you play as the daughter of one of the mission givers from the main campaign. Y'know, some added interest, there.

You get one new tool with this one, which is a jackhammer. Kinda like the sledgehammer in that it's infinite usage and kind of your standard tool, except it can destroy all materials except foundations. Perhaps a bit of an overpowered tool, but eh, it's fun.

It does have to be said, there's a couple of optional objectives we didn't end up going for because they were just a little *too* awkward to tackle (that birdcage, right guys?), but overall, we quite enjoyed Art Vandals, and after falling into the water at the gallery a million times, blowing off some steam in the final mission was a rather satisfying way to finish!

Next up, there's...

Time Campers

Okay, so this one's much maligned, with 50% positive vs. negative ratings on Steam.

That feels.... pretty extreme. Apparently a fair few people have technical difficulties with this one. Perhaps we got lucky, it all worked for us.

And honestly, we kinda like it! It's got horses (with and without carriages), it's got some unique tools, as well as some western variations of your normal toolset, and it's got some of the best music in the game!

The nicest new tool is the gunpowder barrel, which you can use to lay trails of..... well, gunpowder with to make a fuse. A fuse you can then light by blowlamp or, in true style, by shooting it.

We did feel like there was maybe a bit of an increase in difficulty compared to the main campaign? Probably makes sense, as the DLCs are generally meant for people who already know the game. Though yeah, there wasn't anything too tough to handle.

Oh, also, this one's great if you like playing with fire. Darn near everythin' is made from wood, we tells ya!

Moving on to the other fairly maligned DLC:

Folkrace

Okay, with this one, we get why it's maligned. It's a racing DLC in a game that was never really built for racing.

Arguably worse is the fact that pretty much everything this DLC does is already honed to perfection in another game: Wreckfest.

So this whole thing basically lives and dies based on one thing: Can the novelty of playing Wreckfest-lite in Teardown keep you entertained long enough to see you through the DLC?

For us, personally, it did, but it's fair to say that if this DLC was longer, it would have overstayed it's welcome. Mind you, there's little "heist" mini-jobs you can do on the side, which are more like normal Teardown missions in order to earn some extra money for upgrades and stuff.

We did the first one, then skipped the rest. Didn't really see the point, since you earn plenty of money from the races and derbies. And if we wanted to play Teardown, we'd play...... er, well, the other parts of it. 😛

One very common complaint about this DLC seems to be that the AI cheats, which is entirely true, but then, you have a super-special upgradeable megaboost which no one else has. So we don't wanna be "that guy", but...... we found Folkrace fairly easy, with the sole exception being the Bed-Mobile race. The physics on those are just too janky and unpredictable.

So yeah, Folkrace is okay on it's own, but mostly lives off of the novelty of "Wreckfest, but Voxels!", which does wear of relatively soon. But by then, you'll be mostly finished with the DLC, so that's alright.

But then, there's the big one!

The Greenwash Gambit

Now, this one *isn't* maligned! In fact, people like this one!

It's science fiction, and it's quite a big DLC actually, clocking in at 14 missions.

The maps all have much more verticality than anything we've seen previously, which makes them feel much bigger, and their design in general is pretty intricate.

Gameplay-wise, there's a number of additions. For instance, there's blue antigravity-crystals floating around, which you can use to make objects float. Sticking with antigravity, there's a couple of missions that fully take place in zero-G, too.

Generally speaking Greenwash Gambit feels the strongest in terms of it's plot, too. You're a Löckonaut (The game's word, not ours), and you get stranded in space when your ship crashes.

But you come across a little robot called Tier-1 and it's buddy, the Mainframe at base. They're working to sabotage a company that's greenwashing it's products by tossing all the waste into a black hole. The important takeaway is though, it's pretty fun, and the little back-and-forth in the messages between Tier-1 and the mainframe are enjoyable to read.

In the actual missions, Tier-1 doesn't actually do anything other than stroll around the escape vehicle a bit, but let's not hold that against..... him? Her? It? Well, we don't blame 'em, anyway. It's nice just to have a friendly presence on the map with you.

Another thing with this DLC is that you get a few neat sci-fi tools!

There's a laser gun, which is pretty much like the sniper rifle from the normal game. Except this one has recharging ammo and often sets things on fire, which is rather neat.

There's also a gauss blaster for punching bigger holes through things, kinda like a rocket launcher, but shorter range, and without the fire.

And then, you also get a foam gun, which does this!

It took quite a bit of willpower not to call it a GLOO gun. Prey sort of programmed us for that.😉

But yeah, The Greenwash Gambit is pretty great, all in all. It's the biggest DLC, and clearly the one with the most effort behind it.

There's supposed to be another DLC coming, so here's hoping we get another good one. We might write about it, actually!

But until then, we hope you enjoyed our look at Teardown. It's a pretty nifty game that kept us nicely entertained all the way through, and without overstaying it's welcome.

Of course, we could always delve into mods if we wanted yet more, but for the time being, we're satisfied. And hey, we're working our way through a bit of a gaming to-do-list, so we're quite happy with finishing all the official content an moving on. We'll definitely be back for that next DLC, though!

But yes, see you next time, viewers, and here's a few more pictures to see us out!