Another Job Well Done: Thinking Man’s Destruction in Teardown

Your demolition business is crumbling. 

Luckily, a shady cast of characters are willing to help dig you out of debt if you perform a series of heists for them. After all, when the insurance companies and investigators are picking through the rubble, is anyone really going to notice if a few valuables go missing? These dastardly deeds will take you to dockyards, mansions, power stations, tropical islands, and even an amateur amusement park…

And you can destroy almost every square foot of them. 

However, your targets (vaults, fine art, and fast cars) are usually wired and triggering an alarm means you have one minute to finish any remaining objectives and sprint to your escape vehicle. The loop of Teardown is to use that near limitless destruction to plan the most efficient route through the game’s environments. Sometimes this is as simple as parking cars in the right places so you can zip between buildings or chipping away a few layers of brick and stucco to snatch a painting through a wall instead of navigating pesky door frames (the real world nemesis of my poor elbows and wrists). It’s a puzzle game–a puzzle game dusted with a dry rub of gunpowder. 

As you rank up and your clients get more demanding, you unlock the instruments you’d expect to find in a game built around blowing shit up: a blowtorch, pipe bombs, a variety of firearms. My personal favorite is a shotgun that doesn’t discriminate against what material it’s fired at. It can breach doors, gates, and walls without slowing your sprint or starting fires (literally, smoke detectors will also alert the proper authorities–combustion is just one more consideration when selecting the right tool for the job). Not that I have to be at that range, but I’m a surgeon with that shotgun.

In a stroke of genius, your starting kit also includes an unlimited supply of yellow spray paint.  It’s perfect for marking paths so you have one less thing to keep straight when you’re on the clock (that is, if you haven’t learned to just bore tunnels through every structure, yet). Fear not, video game Twitter, the yellow paint is optional. 

This level of chaos comes with constant unintentional comedy. For example, an early mission called for me to remove a safe from the second floor of a seaside office. The safe is too heavy to carry. I remedied this by stealing a nearby crane to yank it free. Extraction was going smoothly–until the crane tipped over on its side. No problem, I thought, the safe was still attached, I could fix things by nudging the crane until the treads could find just enough traction to get upright again. Over the next fifteen minutes, I created a traffic jam as I crashed every car and piece of machinery on the map into that crane which only seemed to dig itself deeper into the pavement. I’d crafted a pile of defeat, a monument to my failure. 

I decided to restart. 

The world of Teardown is composed entirely of voxels (volumetric pixels–think of the blocks in Minecraft), but don’t let this seemingly primitive style deter you because this game is gorgeous. The cubes aren’t uniform here which allows for more detail, and when layered with the lighting and environmental effects, the package sings. When it rains, it comes down in sheets. When fires inevitably ignite, they spread, illuminating the stage in a crackling  glow. Despite my passion for packing fuel tanks and flammables into every nook and cranny, my framerate never dipped on PS5. 

I should specify, my framerate never dipped during the story. 

In sandbox mode the limitations of your inventory are lifted. This provides the opportunity to create a twisting path of nitroglycerin capsules–whose explosive chain reaction can turn the game into a slideshow. This probably won’t affect the majority of people who try Teardown. I admit, I was looking for trouble. 

The narrative is minimal but appreciated. Not a carrot on a stick but cream cheese frosting on a carrot cake. It’s told almost entirely through emails that double as mission briefings (PowerWash Simulator is still the king for this style of storytelling, in my opinion). It’s an amusing touch that your clients are fixated on using you to repeatedly screw each other over. It’s like Yojimbo or A Fistful of Dollars with more sledgehammers. 

Unfortunately, most likely because of all this freedom, the finer mechanics are not as precise as you would want them to be. For instance, at one point, you gain the ability to build simple structures out of wooden planks. During a run, I noticed that the wings of a mansion were close enough together that I could shave ten seconds off my time by constructing a bridge between the two. It was a brilliant idea–but my thumbs became a tangled mess of shoulder button presses, stick swivels, and minor camera adjustments as I struggled to get the angles exactly right. I eventually made it work–but you better believe I kept a quicksave locked and loaded (and reloaded and reloaded) until it was perfect. If you can think of a strategy, you can probably pull it off–even if it means pulling all your hair out in the process. 

While the game feel isn’t perfect the overall experience IS perfectly balanced. The clever way the targets are spread out in each level meant I was never comfortable (I pulled myself into the driver seat of my escape van on many of the jobs with less than a second on the clock). It consistently kept me curious if I could sneak in an extra detour to acquire an extra valuable. It made me strive to be the best thief I could be not because of the promise of a higher score or arbitrary completion percentage but because it’s fun. 

The second half of the campaign attempts to alter the formula and the results are mixed. Replaying a flooded version of a familiar level is a nice change of pace–holding a button for five seconds to “hack” instead of planting explosives is less exciting–moving clunky, heavy barrels to an extraction point isn’t even a little bit. These deviations aren’t all bad, but even with the added variety, it never reaches the highs of when you’re just beginning to test the boundaries of what’s possible with a new toy. 

The soundtrack is barely worth mentioning. The song that plays while you make your escape is fittingly intense with just a touch of jazz (it helps that it’s punctuated by helicopter rotors thundering closer as security tightens the noose). Sittings of Teardown become a convenient place to get caught up on podcasts faster than most games (especially the lengthy planning stages during the final string of levels). I rolled credits at 15 hours having completed around 75% of the optional objectives. If you decide to chase that platinum trophy (which includes destroying 100 million voxels) you could probably plow through a whole library of audiobooks. Maybe consider a book about metals?

Teardown only does one thing but it does it extremely well. I can honestly say I haven’t played anything quite like it (the closest example I can think of is Blast Corps on the Nintendo 64–the final level of the Teardown campaign where you’re forced to demolish a suburb to make way for a bomb on wheels is pulled straight from Rare’s classic). It blends the raw, “lizard brain” of making things go boom with the more complex  satisfaction of a plan coming together. PlayStation Plus Extra subscribers can download it for free and I recommend they do. Even if the structure of the story doesn’t click for you, you can always break things in sandbox mode until you feel better.