Picking Up Steam: Demolish & Build 2018 (PC)

Bulldozers. Jackhammers. Wrecking balls. The destructive potential of such powerful construction equipment can seem exciting, but in reality, they often require careful handling not only because of the costly damage that could be caused by messing up even a little, but the tool and the user might not survive improper use. Luckily, there are video games like Demolish & Build 2018 where you’re able to freely indulge in some destructive tendencies, although as the “Build” part of the title indicates, this vehicle simulation game still understands there should be a bit more to do than just go on a brief tear with heavy machinery.

 

Demolish & Build 2018 starts you off fresh off losing your job at a demolition company, but you have a buddy who has some cash and an idea. Your character will be the face of a new company focused on construction and demolition, your resources starting small, but as you earn cash you can start buying new equipment, head to new locations, and work your way towards being a better company than the one you got kicked out of. The game doesn’t check in on this framework plot much, the ending to this rivalry barely addressed as the more important element is that building a company up from nothing gives you goals to shoot for and reaching different reputation levels will mark a clear point where you can move onto new places with new types of work. There are four major areas in total, the game starting in a quiet desert town and eventually leading to areas like a snowy mountainside and an island with many luxury buildings, each place having some specific new vehicles to acquire to suit that region’s specific demands.

For the most part, Demolish & Build 2018 sees you heading to areas marked on your map to do a job and get paid. You can move around outside of vehicles and even have a few hand tools like a jackhammer, sledgehammer, and welding torch, but tasks involving them are usually supplementary or are just a way to get some scratch when you’re just starting out. The main appeal will definitely be getting behind the wheel of the heavy duty equipment. The destruction is definitely made to look visually satisfying, structures crumbling when you hit them in the right spot and the player usually just needs a bit of speed and aim to start doing things like bulldozing through an old wooden saloon or send chunks of a parking structure falling all about. Admittedly, you can see the video game elements in how things crumble at times though. If you don’t hit the specific support pillar, sometimes a piece of a building illogically remains suspended in the air, and the wrecking ball’s functions can be rather odd. You don’t need momentum to do damage with the wrecking ball, sometimes able to pull it up slowly or drop it and bash through floors and walls that way, but it feels like some of these breaks from reality make the fantasy of tearing things down more accessible. It could have been easy for your destruction work to go very slowly if you needed to hit all the right spots perfectly, Demolish & Build 2018 not trying to make the work tedious even though some inevitable repetition will set in over time.

 

One area where you’ll probably start feeling like things are a bit too similar is in the locations you can purchase to build yourself. Demolish & Build 2018 does make good on the promise you will do some true construction work. You are able to buy protected parking areas, build up houses, and even establish material mines, the work for these often requiring greater use of vehicles like cranes and even some neat unique offerings like cement mixers to create areas that can offer you some passive income. Building up these locations can involve some less exciting work, driving pallets of materials across town repeatedly, trying to finagle support struts into place, and ultimately finding the work not as creatively broad as demolition where you can smash apart old churches, bridges, and even a derelict space shuttle. You can hire workers to do some of the work though, this especially useful for maintenance tasks where you’d otherwise have to do true busywork like flattening bushes so your locations can be fit for their function.

 

Demolition also has the benefit of being complicated in more varied ways. Early on you’ll start to notice materials on-site you’ll be fined for breaking, these clearly marked by red symbols. Similarly, some debris at worksites will actually damage your vehicle should you run into it. Normal damage from things like a ceiling falling on your vehicles will just require you using a wrench to swiftly get it back to 100%, but hitting the sharp debris will require buying a replacement part, an instantaneous but costly repair. Some vehicles can destroy the harmful debris though, making it quite satisfying once you’ve got the kind of heavy duty equipment that ignores such dangers. Dust is also something you might want to keep in mind. If you don’t hose down some structures before breaking them down, you’ll get fined for the dust spread by the act. A dust meter does show if you’re hitting the level where it will be fined so there is a little allowance for it, and unlike other damages, dust fines aren’t too great so you can just tough it out if you realized you were sloppy with your spraying before the job.

Much of the time, Demolish & Build 2018 really will be about heading to the work site and getting to work breaking things. You have a special worker vision to highlight what needs breaking, something useful when you’re only meant to break certain parts of a building, and the game sometimes even gives a little too much leeway in how much needs doing. You might need to get out your circular saw to cut some rebar and yet still have quite a bit of it jutting out the ground when the game considers that task done, but that leniency also means you don’t need to break every piece of concrete to have a sidewalk busting job marked as complete. In fact, in some cases, going the extra mile and breaking more than the minimum required can make the job’s payout much greater, and since much of the debris that doesn’t matter will disappear, it’s easy to do sweep ups for bonus money. Emergency jobs can also crop up and pay out handsomely, clearing rocks and trees off the road almost always worth heading out to. The area maps are pretty navigable as well, at first requiring you to explore them in your pick-up truck but you’ll be able to take instant taxis to previously visited locations which makes getting around much easier.

 

Demolish & Build 2018 can be a rickety experience at times though. One of the earliest issues you’ll find is controlling some of your vehicles at all. Driving them is usually easy enough, but operating arms and positioning the business end of a vehicle can involve a good range of keys or buttons. Sometimes you need to swap from driving controls to arm controls, but then some vehicles have important functions under both those banners so swapping around can get a bit tedious. Some equipment will come with multiple attachments like the excavators having digging, jackhammer, and shears. You need to pause, go to a certain menu, and swap the head out as needed, it pulling you out of the work but technically easier than sometimes trying to remember the exact sequence of buttons needed to perform specific functions. Demolish & Build 2018 isn’t without its glitches either. One time when trying to wrangle the crane arm of one of the vehicles, I accidentally pressed it down against an innocuous pipe and suddenly found myself and the multi-ton vehicle rocketing off into the sky, twirling all around the map. The taxis and the parking sign used to teleport vehicles to jobs did save me that time, but progress can be lost on a job if a vital construction piece falls into an unreachable spot or one of the game menus simply doesn’t allow an action for an unclear reason. Even on the small scale, your heavy vehicles can sometime be sent rolling by odd little bumps, the physics not always playing nice but often not leading to jobs being impossible to complete at least.

 

The technical issues are more like landmines that suddenly appear than constant worries thankfully. Demolish & Build 2018 does offer multiplayer play where you build and destroy together, although if you work through the campaign enough to see the end of its small story, you’ll have likely done every mission type and all they’ll do is loop repeatedly and in order per location. Some other tasks like finding scrap out in the world to sell for cash aren’t very rewarding or involved, the entertainment more likely coming from sticking to the sequence of new work one time through rather than trying to make it last through the rehashes and chores. That way, you can better enjoy the novelty of something like a remote-controlled demolition robot rather than having its novelty wear away from too much repeat exposure. Considering the campaign already might take around 20 hours if you are just seeking out the new stuff, Demolish & Build 2018 does feel like it offers enough content to scratch the itch of playing with heavy machinery.

THE VERDICT: Sometimes repetitive, sometimes glitchy or fiddly, Demolish & Build 2018 still gets by well enough because it delivers what it promises. You get to use big construction vehicles, hand tools, and even a remote control robot to break apart huge structures, and while some of it is pretty simple work, the game still tries to get creative with the locations and tasks on top of waiting until later areas to give you the really powerful stuff. Construction can end up more basic and unexciting because it is less adventurous, but if you’re looking for a demolition simulator and can accept some of its less realistic moments, Demolish & Build 2018 does its job of providing that. It just won’t get bonus points for putting in any extra work.

 

And so, I give Demolish & Build 2018 for PC…

An OKAY rating. Demolish & Build 2018 doesn’t lean too realistic or too ridiculous. Even the more out there ideas like demolishing an old space shuttle or using the demolition robot are not outside the realm of possibility, but the game doesn’t want to you be as careful as real construction or demolition crews when doing your job. You get the satisfaction of seeing things crumble apart as you smash them with your powerful equipment, you get a few small considerations like dust and dangerous debris to avoid it being pure mindless carnage, and the game does a decent job rolling out new mission types that keep you cycling through your tools. The construction work does feel a bit tacked on by comparison though, ideas like the concrete mixer working well but with multiple locations being built near identically, it becomes the least interesting part of your available work. A full commitment to demolition might have been more productive and maybe given more time to iron out the kinks, or construction could have been done without repeating ideas so often. Demolish & Build 2018 is the kind of game you can while away the hours with, most work not having too many time considerations meaning it can be a bit relaxing despite its destructive nature. Some cleaner controls and physics that didn’t sometimes send a machine tumbling for pushing against a wall too much would help it, but continued and imaginative iteration feels like the next step to take this concept further.

 

Demolish & Build 2018 is a bit of a standard vehicle simulator, in that it promises a certain type of real life work in video game form.  You get what you came for, not much more, not much less. It has some issues, but it also has some unique touches, but it never really aims to be the be-all end-all demolition game nor does it try to give itself a unique characteristic. Despite the year in its name, it’s not part of a yearly series, there are four games total between 2016 and 2024, but appending a year to the title does sort of show it wasn’t exactly planning to be the last game of its type you’d need. You get a bunch of jobs in its format and you then check out what the development team has for you in another entry. While its gameplay niche leads to some satisfying work, there’s definitely still room to build it into the kind of simulator that could provide its style of play for more than just its designated year.