Smash.
Bring down the house
Crime is all about decisions. Do you wanna leave a scene full of revealing clues? Fingerprints in the dust of a windowsill, footprints in the mud? Or do you wanna leave the fuzz with an absolute bombsite. Why's that car wedged into the ceiling? Never mind who opened these doors, none of them are on their hinges anymore. Didn't this office have a roof? Where did Building C go? The key to a good caper, I reckon, is leaving every crime scene without a single brick standing.
Teardown, a delightfully destructive sandbox heist game, has scheduled its opening day for some time next year. Myself? I'm ready to take a sledgehammer to the nearest wall right now.
In case you've not also been watching developer Dennis Gustaffson's tweets like a hawk this past year, today's video nicely sums up Teardown is all about. It's quite pleasant, too, listening to this kindly Swedish man explain the player's limited toolkit while yeeting a desk out the window.
Now, I love me a good bit of destruction. Throw Cubes Into Brick Towers To Collapse Them was demolishing my free time 'till Noita came along, after all. But there's a particular place in my heart for (the game that would become) Teardown, thanks to some phenomenal video work from developer Dennis Gustafsson.
Cor, look at that. Brings a tear to my eyes.
Despite its chunky voxel stylings, Teardown has some delightfully convincing destruction. Wires flex and stretch, metal pipes wobble and brick walls crumble just as you'd expect. I'm actually shocked Gustafsson bothered to throw an actual game in there - a hammer, some bombs and a dirty industrial sandbox would've entertained me for hours anyway.
Ah, well. It sounds like the gameplay proper will encourage some smashing good times anyway. Gustafsson is calling it a heist game, where you'll need to scour a map and nab valuables. An alarm rings once you've pilfered the first item, giving you limited time to charge through the arena hunting the remaining curiosities, walls and ceilings be damned.
It's quite a light little affair, all things considered, and definitely more about showing off some neat tech than building a solid game. But I'm still quite excited to get my hands on Teardown when it launches on Steam in 2020.