I said it back in my top games of 2022 piece, Teardown is easily one of the most enjoyable games to release in the last year or so. With destruction, demolition, and pixel-based devastation, the heists of Teardown are the heart of gameplay in the long run. From using a sledgehammer to blowing a hole in the walls with explosives of varying degrees, you have a lot at your disposal. Though they are described as heists, you won’t be playing the Lalo Schifrin classic as you blowtorch a door off by the hinges and plow a car into the walls of a mall.

From an hour or more of planning to the few explosive moments of action; to quote Sandra Bullock back in 2009, “There’s a moment of orderly silence before a football play begins.” In 60 seconds, all those plans to put holes in walls, drive a car through a pane of glass, steal a safe, realign satellites, and whatever else was part of the objective, all come together like a traffic accident. Stuff has randomly collided and there is a sense of order after the fact. There’s also a moment of relief that such a stupid plan would work. The adrenaline slowly dies after you see just how slim the margin was to get caught.

None of this is to say that all of the so-called heists are perfect. In fact, they are sometimes less than pleasant. I’m also not saying the destruction is entirely perfect either. The small voxel maps might be making up for the reason you can rip the blocky recreation of Gloucester Cathedral down in half the time it takes to work out what’s under the floorboards of the former catholic church, but it has its flaws. Something tells me the tensile strength of a pane of glass can’t suspend a whole building like it is Doug Henning. Slicing a skyscraper in twain but missing the pipe of an air conditioning unit leaves you with a severely unsatisfied priapism.

With that in mind, lateral thinking comes into its own as your goals go from dropping granny’s house to rubble to hacking computers on opposite ends of the map. Suddenly your destruction tools aren’t about leveling the entire world and are used to solve a maze of things that dissolve like a wet oreo. What makes it difficult however is the need to do it all in a short time frame after you’ve hit the first one, as a majority of the time they are all alarmed. Though sometimes you’ll find some that are alarmed and can be moved towards your getaway van/boat, offering some quick wins.

What doesn’t work once the gameplay facade drops is the point you’re being shot and killed every two-point five femtoseconds. There is one mission where you are escaping in your boat as a police helicopter shoots you and you have to get out to raise bridges. For a typical game that is fine, but Teardown isn’t a typical game. It’s an experiment that uses the idea of game design to get past the fact some people moan if you aren’t taken by the hand to do something. At that point, your intuitive thinking doesn’t matter as you hoot like Daffy Duck when Elmer Fudd is tricked by that wabbit to think it is Duck hunting season.

Aside from when you are being hung by your feet and basted for dinner, there is a sense of catharsis that is almost unmatched as you watch an entire dock and adjoining stilted houses drop into the sea after you set that fire you talked about in school many years ago. Enabling some of the built-in mods, I had a laser gun I used for the “Insurance Fraud” heist. In said heist, you have to get a couple of cars through this wall to your awaiting truck. The reason I’m talking about this is simply how great it felt to cut out this wall with the laser gun, then single-handedly pull the wall down with a satisfying thud.

The careful deconstruction and tidy-up portion might be a “controversial” aspect as it can be tiresome to drag individual sections of rubble out of your path. Though I think that works in Teardown‘s favor and the leafblower later on offers respite from throwing chunks of concrete across the room. Larger sections are still something to be heaved out of the way slowly, or possibly placed just right to ramp off of. This can lead to moments such as the food court of the mall, where I took out everything that wasn’t nailed down and satisfyingly set fire to it in the parking lot.

Sometimes Teardown requires more abstract thought than what simply seems natural, but you’ll figure out a way to complete mad objectives in some way or another. That’s the true strength of Teardown, the ability to provide the “play it how you want” gameplay without overburdening the player with options. There might be a play-it-how-you-want element, but at the end of the day, if you screw up and get caught, the robots kill you or you somehow blow yourself up. There is always something to tell you that this way isn’t how you solve this mission.

Teardown beautifully balances gamified elements that give you a structured path to walk but leaves itself open enough to give you multiple solutions to its puzzles. That’s what Teardown is, a puzzle game that forgoes crosswords, Pipe Mania, or Simon Says, and instead uses the language of bombs, shotguns, and punting a hole the size of a semi-truck through a wall. It is aesthetically gorgeous with the small-ish map sizes, fun and thoughtful throughout, and an experiment that actually works well the first time out. I think it is clear from the very start, I deeply enjoy Tuxedo Labs’ box of physics objects that burn so well.

Ultimately, whether it’s blowing up the White House or blowing up your Caribbean holiday home after your escape, there is plenty of fun to be had. That freedom is let down by the moments that relinquish the abstract thinking, such as “The Chase” or the time trial race at Villa Gordon. As such, it can be difficult to enjoy every moment. While lacking the tensile strength or other elements that make the likes of Red Faction Guerrilla or even Luke Schneider’s Instruments of Destruction, there is enough satisfaction in the destruction at hand. Hours of (imperfect) pyromania fun are to be had in Teardown.

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Teardown

$19.99

8.5

Score

8.5/10

Pros

• Boom!
• Chaos followed by the stillness of a mad plan working.
• Look at it, it is gorgeous.

Cons

• The rubble clearing can be annoying at the start.
• I'd like some bigger maps.
• Attempts to be a conventional game do not work.