Teardown will show you the wonders of demolition as long as you don’t get caught.
Don’t you just love it when you get lured into a seemingly normal game but then it does a complete 180 and becomes something else entirely while still keeping you hooked. The same can be said about Tuxedo Labs’ infamous Teardown, which lures you in with the promise of satisfying demolition but leaves you questioning your true motives in the game.
Now, for those of you who are unfamiliar with Tuxedo Labs, they are a small team of game developers who all have quite a bit of experience working in the gaming industry. This small studio of veteran devs based in Malmö, Sweden, came together to give us a neat little game called Teardown, which takes a few interesting genres and turns them on their head to give us a surprisingly satisfying demolition game that has a few cards… Well, hammers hiding under its sleeves.
Now, with this being the developer’s first and only major release, Teardown is a bit of an odd game to describe. Imagine House Flipper, but instead of renovating and designing houses, you’re demolishing them instead, but also with the aesthetic of voxel games such as Minecraft or CubeWorld. Now that on its own sounds like a pretty solid game, but Tuxedo Labs decided to spice things up and threw in a heist simulator. That’s right folks, unlike other stealth-heavy thief games, in Teardown, you don’t sneak through a window; you rip it apart.
Much like other heist games, you do have what seems to be a rough framework of a story. The character you play as does seem to have some sort of backstory, even if it’s kept incredibly vague and up to interpretation. Your story starts when your mysterious character arrives at an old abandoned train station. This area will also be your base of operations as well as where your character will sleep. This is also where you will notice that the game just has some really beautiful lighting, especially when paired with the cubic art style.
Besides your tools, bed and transport in your base of operations, you will also have access to probably one of your most important tools, the computer. There you will be able to plan out your next heist, upgrade your equipment and see what jobs are available. As stated earlier, we do get glimpses into our character’s past. This is mostly done through emails, such as with your mother, Tracy. You see, the family business has been a bit slow and things aren’t looking good, so she asks you to get creative with jobs. Apparently, to your character, “get creative” means start your new life of crime.
At first glance, your first job doesn’t seem like anything too crazy; you’re just demolishing a house so they can build a mall. Here you will also learn that the environments in Teardown are completely destructible, and with your somewhat limited tool kit, you are obviously meant to get creative and attack the building with your sledgehammer and an array of other environmental hazards. One of these aforementioned hazards is propane tanks, which can be thrown at pesky walls to bring them down, along with everything else near them. Just be aware of fires as they’ll trip the alarm and that would mean game over.
Alarms are probably one of your biggest obstacles because while yes, the game does let you have a near-endless variety of ways to commit giant amounts of property damage, you still need to be careful when doing so. When you trigger an alarm, they will set off a timer. This timer indicates how much time you have left to complete your objectives before you get caught and get the game over.
This becomes notably more difficult when doing missions on larger maps because you will now need to plan out your heist and choose routes that won’t set off the alarm, which is easier said than done, especially when one of your objectives is wired to the alarm and your getaway vehicle is on the other side of the map.
As mentioned earlier on in this review, you are a demolitioner, which means that you have a wide array of tools at your disposal. When you start the game, sadly, you won’t have much but your old reliable sledgehammer. The sledgehammer will probably be your most used tool as it quite literally breaks through anything except for metal and brick. This is where your other most commonly used tool, the blowtorch, comes in handy; unlike the sledgehammer, the blow torch can easily break through anything metal, from metal bars, cars, doors, and beams; if it’s metal, your blowtorch will break it.
As for other materials, such as bricks, they do require some more “unusual” tools to break them. These tools include propane tanks, nitroglycerin, and let’s not forget the shotgun and pipe bombs! Now don’t get too excited as you will have to unlock these new tools later after completing a few more missions.
As for the missions themselves, strangely enough, Teardown features a scoring system and ranks. The more jobs that you do, the higher your character will climb the ranks. As for your score at the end of every mission, if you do the bare minimum, you’ll receive a pretty decent score, and that will be it. However, if you want to reach higher ranks and better tools, then it is highly recommended that you try to go out of your way to complete all the small objectives. This does become more difficult in later levels as each new area comes with all your layers of security.
However, if you don’t enjoy the ever-increasing difficulty that comes with the game’s story mode, then boy, oh boy, you will be glad to know that Teardown comes with Sandbox Mode. This mode no longer has the limits and restrictions that come with the game’s story mode and instead allows you to perform needless destruction to your heart’s content. However, if you want even more freedom, you will be glad to know that Teardown’s developers actively support the game’s modding scene. Meaning if you want something, you probably could just add it to the game.
But if modding isn’t really your cup of tea. Teardown does let you adjust a lot of its levels to your liking. You have options to adjust alarm times, unlock all locations, unlock all tools and even unlock creative mode, which allows you to make your own custom levels using many of the game’s own assets.
Teardown is a game that clearly shows that the devs care a lot about their audience and that they want players to have as much fun as they possibly can have with their game. The game is certainly an interesting one with its demolition and heist mechanics that is paired perfectly with beautiful lighting and satisfying sound design. Teardown is definitely something you should check out.
