Teardown (PS5)
In Teardown, you can destroy almost everything. Buildings can be completely demolished, cars can be dismantled until there isn’t even scrap left behind to show they were there. Beyond the ground beneath your feet, very few things can withstand the strength of your demolition tools, but this game isn’t just about breaking apart things for the thrill of it. Teardown is a heist video game, your ability to break almost anything essentially your way of figuring out the puzzle that is safely getting away with vandalism and theft.
In this first-person game, you’re a down on your luck demolitionist who can’t seem to find much paying work in the fictional Swedish municipality of Löckelle. With money starting to get tight, your well-meaning mother puts you in contact with some work outside of your wheelhouse, only for this to lead you down the path of using your expertise for a range of illegal activities. The people asking for your help do have different motivations though. You’ll help out a cop who can’t seem to get the necessary evidence against other criminals, but you’ll also play both sides in a feud between rich businessmen as they keep asking you to sabotage the other. At times you’re participating in some petty revenge while others you end up helping a person who you later work to take down, although beyond e-mails and news reports you’ll never interact with them as unsurprisingly a lot of your work must be done in secret and away from watchful eyes.
When you set out on a job, you’ll usually find yourself in a fairly large area like a marina or mall after it’s been shut down for the day. You almost have free reign of the place, free to smash down walls, drive vehicles around, or even look around for the rare bits of loot you can pilfer for a bit of extra cash that goes towards upgrading your equipment to be more effective. However, these places aren’t entirely lacking in security. Fire alarms mean you can’t be too careless, but the real danger to your work is going to be wire alarms that are often hooked up directly to the objects you’ve come to pilfer or pulverize. Once a wire alarm is tripped, you have sixty seconds to do whatever remaining work you have and make an escape, a helicopter showing up to terminate your run if you can’t get away in time. Because of the size of these areas you’ll definitely need to put the “smash” in “smash and grab” to creative use, and this is where Teardown’s heist gameplay truly starts to show its potential.
The world of Teardown is built out of voxels, meaning every object is technically composed of tiny cubes. This is what allows so much of it to be destructible, the game determining if you’re using a strong enough tool and then breaking apart or erasing the voxels accordingly. A sledgehammer can easily smash through wood and thin walls, but you’ll need to whip out the blowtorch for tougher metals, timed bombs for heavy duty work, and even, surprisingly enough, firearms. Teardown doesn’t limit itself just to the expected items, the player gradually unlocks new equipment that greatly expands how you not only destroy the areas you’re infiltrating but also start to adjust things for even better heists. The shotgun is great for blasting a big hole through most things despite its limited ammunition, but if you want to reach places without too much damage, you eventually unlock planks that let you build your own scaffolding to scale. Explosives are great for when you need to wreck something in a hurry, but if you’d rather carefully move an object away, alarm and all sometimes, you can hook one of your cables up to a car you found on site and drag it to somewhere more convenient for your eventual escape route.
The challenge in most levels of Teardown ends up being figuring out the optimal path to collect each target object, the game even giving you a spray paint can so you can draw yourself a guiding line to hone it down to perfection. In some levels this may be as simple as busting down a few walls so you can run between buildings rather quickly, but in others you might be tasked with totaling a range of cars quickly and finding out the best way to drive them safely to a spot where they can be instantly destroyed makes for a much greater puzzle. There is a lot of freedom in reshaping the world, but the limitations in place keep the puzzle elements alive even once your toolkit becomes quite diverse. The ground being unbreakable means you can’t just flatten hills or remove mountains in your way and limiting the amount you can use something like the planks means you also can’t just fashion clean bridges as much as you like. Teardown mixes the incredible freedom of being able to dismantle much of its world with reasonable barriers that ensure the task still requires thought and skill to complete, especially with the alarms necessitating a clean run at the end.
Admittedly, the voxel world does mean it’s occasionally possible you have a perfect plan for completing your job only for a car wheel to hitch on an errant cube or other some small hitch arises because things can fall apart with ease, but Teardown also offers a Quick Save system that not only insures you against such issues, but it allows you test your strategies or even indulge in some crazier experimentation. You can only have a single quick save active during a level, but you’re able to reload it without punishment and save over it as much as you like. If you’re worried an action might trip an alarm, just quick save. If you think you have a workable solution to the level, quick save first and then give it a shot to see if you’re right. That mix of freedom with important limits manifests here well, the game not wanting to restrict you from going for more creative solutions just because there is risked involved, but it also seems like Teardown is trying to keep you from resetting your work too often, the commitment to some earlier work that didn’t pan out sometimes leading to amusing makeshift solutions that still work out in the end.
Teardown is divided into two parts for its main campaign, and the second part is far more ambitious than the first. The initial set of jobs tend to revisit the same locations a bit too often and mostly involves variations on the basic level concept of wiring up alarms on your theft or vandalism targets. There are a few demolition focused tasks thrown in there including a creative one where you actually are more worried about keeping a lightning storm from triggering fire alarms than dealing with the consequences of your own destruction, but while it can concoct challenging designs for the same few areas including some that require remarkable precision and planning if you want to get both the required and optional targets safely, seeing the next mission takes you back to a familiar mansion doesn’t stoke the same imagination or range for creative expression as a new location or different task type could. Luckily, once you reach part 2 of the campaign, things start getting far more experimental and completely new areas are thrown in the mix. Not only is there a tropical island section where your equipment is limited save for what you can find on site, new objectives like trying to avoid a roaming security helicopter’s attention or clearing paths for satellite transmissions to properly relay start to change how you think about your work. You’ll still get some familiar thieving tasks, usually with some new wrinkle or location, Teardown reinvigorating itself and starting to experiment with its format in ways that means right before the game seemingly ran out of gas it instead surges with something that hooks you with its new imaginative job concepts.
Teardown does have some extra content beyond the campaign to keep you coming back as well. The Art Vandals free expansion features a new location and even new tools like a jackhammer, but if you just want to cause as much destruction as you can pull off, sandbox mode gives you free rein to use your tools to tear places to pieces. The challenge mode isn’t as deeply realized as campaign missions, but they do offer extra tasks to do, some with unique ideas. Fetch challenges are essentially the usual smash and grab but with the player having a wider range of targets to potentially grab, the idea being you grab as many as possible before making your escape. Mayhem and Hunted are a bit more unique though. Mayhem is about destroying as much of the level as you can in sixty seconds, the timer starting once you’ve destroyed a certain amount so you can still potentially set up an effective route with smaller bits of demolition. Hunted is actually focused more on real time survival, the player running around a map trying to grab chests while an attack helicopter tries to gun you down. The high score focus is again an interesting shift in format and pretty much every game type here inevitably benefits from the player’s ability to alter the environment so heavily, and you can even say this flexibility extends to the options menu during the campaign as you can do things like give yourself an extra sixty seconds if you find the tight escape times a bit hard to handle. Teardown knows it has something good with its demolition mechanics and chooses to let the player explore them rather than locking things into tight of a box to really appreciate the opportunities for interesting play it opens up.
THE VERDICT: While Teardown takes a while to stretch its legs with its mission objective creativity, its demolition systems are compelling throughout and a wonderful canvas for player creativity. Your tools are able to reshape the environment with the right amount of freedom that you’re able to concoct a range of successful paths for a heist while still needing to consider the level layout thanks to reasonable limits on things like time and how much gear you’re able to bring. The satisfaction in devising an imaginative solution is made more compelling because the game smartly places a few guiding restrictions while letting you otherwise smash and reshape the area to suit your needs, the basic thrill of destruction blended wonderfully with deep strategizing here.
And so, I give Teardown for PlayStation 5…
A GREAT rating. Getting acclimated to the range of opportunities levels offer you inherently might be part of the reason Teardown takes a while to diversify its locations and missions some, although its development beginning as an Early Access Steam title also meant it was likely frontloaded with concepts that could be realized at first before experimental ideas could be added in the back half thanks to its sales success and public feedback. The game’s effectiveness definitely emerges from the depth involved in planning out a successful heist, so new goals and areas are inevitably strong variables to diversify the required strategies needed to succeed. The early game is still able to provide a sense of wonder though thanks to the rollout of new tools, the player discovering new ways to reshape the stages so they can start to dive into the more advanced ideas, and levels are even fairly good at hinting at such directions as it will place objects with potential interesting interactions near each other in time with your unlocks. It’s no coincidence that a crane and a car on a pallet are placed near each other around the time you unlock the cables that will allow you to carry it off safely without triggering an alarm, but there are many times where it won’t just grant you a potential solution and you have a whole range of level objects and tools to potentially figure out the best way to lay things out for your perfect run. Beyond taking a while to roll out some of its more creative ideas, Teardown’s issues mostly just come down to some inevitable parts of its design. Being able to tear your car apart with collisions is a useful feature at times and at others you can find it a hindrance as you’re trying to drive over debris or some fairly solid vegetation, but that’s often just a sign you should have done a bit more work setting things up first and the deliberate barriers are a bit more obvious so you don’t waste time trying to demolish a mountain.
Teardown’s objectives are smartly designed so that it rarely takes away too much of your power, the player often just needing to treat certain things delicately while they’re free to break down much of the world around the all important target items. A few indulgent missions here or there are nice places to decompress while other levels really require tight strategy and an eye for how to remodel the environment to escape in time, it easy for time to melt away as this creative mix of demolition and strategy serves as a compelling canvas for constant experimentation.