Looking for a game to fulfil your destructive, pyromaniac and kleptomaniac tendencies? Teardown has you covered! After starting the campaign you are thrust into Teardown's voxel-based building-brick world and placed in front of a demolitions warehouse. This is your HQ and within it you find a computer where you will receive emails throughout your playthrough, offering you the various missions, some of which you can pick and choose as you progress through the campaign’s roughly 40 missions (9 of these missions are optional).
The first mission is from your mother who can not pay her bills, and pleads with you to do a job for someone she knows who needs a building torn down. After completing this mission, you find yourself in hot water as the person you destroyed the building for did not in fact own the now demolished building…
After completing this first mission, all other missions will require some strategic pre-planning, as there will be sections of the missions that will be timed. Saving at key points is vital, as certain actions (such as stealing an item connected to an alarm or letting a fire burn out of control) set a countdown running and failure is extremely likely, so restarting immediately before you trigger an alarm saves a lot of replaying and setting up.
At the start of a mission you are able to look at an overview of the area, enabling you to pre-plan your fastest escape routes and get creative. Most of your missions will include collecting items, stealing items, destroying buildings, destroying vehicles, or a combination of these. You may want to demolish walls, smash holes in floors, place vehicles and stack objects to build ramps in order to aid your path to a successful escape.
Any of these actions within a mission may trigger an alarm and timer. This means you'll need to escape the area before being caught by a patrol helicopter. I'm not generally a fan of timers and time limits, but you have all the time you want to explore a location and plan the job before triggering anything so it sort-of works by adding a sense of urgency and tension.
As for how you go about completing each mission, that seems to be left up to you to choose. While there will be set objectives and optimum ways of demolishing or stealing items, there are often multiple ways you can complete those objectives as well as optional objectives to earn extra pay. More options become available as you earn more money and upgrade your warehouse and “tools,” such as your blowtorch (for cutting metal), shotgun (blowing holes in things), pipe bombs (thrown explosives) and planks (used to build ramps, bridges and can even be used to attach one object to another.)
Just like in real life, as a self-employed “contractor" you get work from people who are enemies, so you may be stealing cars from one guy, then demolishing a building that belongs to the new car owner for the guy you just stole them from! This tit-for-tat action sees you revisiting locations to perform different revenge-type missions. This would sound like cheap reuse of a location in most other games but the missions are so different you won't mind.
Sadly there's no replay mode but at the end of a mission a red line does trace the path you took via an aerial view, which is fascinating to watch and can give you a good idea where you could save time if you want to revisit a mission to get a better score–and chances are you will because they're such fun!
The game's later missions get increasingly complex, adding more objectives, and it is generally a good idea to try to complete all of them, as this will net you the highest monetary return and enable more upgrades to either your warehouse or weapons.
For a game based on destroying things, I would have thought there would be considerable slow down or lag, but Teardown stays smooth even when multiple massive structures collapse at the same time.
Besides the campaign missions, there are also challenge missions you can undertake, as well as dozens of mods created by modders in the Teardown community, including things as diverse as touring car racing and a minigun! There are also 2 Expansion packs created by the Teardown team; “Art Vandals” and “Time Campers”, both are well worth a look but not until you've finished the campaign! Sadly there is no multiplayer mode so you will have to make do with the aforementioned options. But all of these options have the potential to keep you busy for 30-plus hours depending on how many mods you download and play.
After a successful job you may watch a newsflash on the TV at your HQ of your previous exploits–a brilliant touch. Having played Teardown a lot–and I mean a LOT, I’m still not sure what kind of game it is; First/Third-Person Demolition, Theft, Heist, Vandalism, Planning, Strategy, Driving, Racing, Shooting… Teardown has them all!
Many thanks to Tuxedo Labs, Saber Interactive and Honest PR for the review code