This game is kind of a mixed bag.
Well not really, but i just don't want to start the review straight up calling it bad.
What i'm trying to say is that I really wanted to like it. And i've come back to it multiple times in the last 2-3years to give it another chance again and again. Maybe i will like it this time? but no.
Good idea, bad execution?
Lets start with the good.
i like the graphics. i also like the concept of the voxel destruction.
but that is where the good stuff ends. Also the main gimmick of voxel destruction is where this game starts and ends, but it is also where the issues begin.
Now with the bad.
Here is the gameplay loop of the campaign:
1. Run around creating small holes in walls and moving vehicles to create a straight as possible path.
2. Speedrun that ♥♥♥♥
Not only is this a gameplay loop that is not very engaging, but it doesn't even make good use of the voxel engine.
But what really makes the campaign awful is the player movement.
There were multiple times where i placed a plank in an angle that i can run up. But not really. Sometimes as i'm trying to speedrun the level the character just refuses to run the same angle plank it had no issue with before.
and this is not issue with the planks only but everything that might be in an angle.
secondly as the gameworld is built from voxels, there is a tiny drop from voxel to voxel. You would think the player movement compensates for this somehow, but no. What ends up happening is that as you are trying to run through the map, you sometimes end up in a tiniest falling animation, which means you can't jump, which means you failed the mission. This just makes jumping extremely unreliable. Also with the voxel destruction it is quite often very difficult to prevent uneven surfaces.
Like with the planks and other angled surfaces, you think it will work, but actually it only works like 10% time.
Now combine these unreliable mechanics with a gameplay that is all about speedrunning against the clock, and you should see why this just ends up being frustrating. You have to keep retrying again and again even though you didn't do anything wrong. Your perfectly executed plan becomes an gamble as you keep fighting against the movement physics.
I just don't think the player movement is good enough and reliable enough for the "run through the levels fast as possible" campaign.
Now you could say that the campaign is afterthought. That's fair. you can unlock the sandbox levels from the options menu so i would agree with that.
But even the sandbox gameplay is kinda underwhelming, and remember the same movement physics apply.
outside of blowing things up the voxel physics are kinda half-baked.
If you try to fall a tall structure it usually goes something like this.
After you find the last single voxel holding it all up (yes, a single voxel in a far corner of a building is enough to keep it intact), it falls straight down on its original footprint rather than falling to one side or another. Even if that is specifically how you are trying to make it fall in the way you destroyed the voxels. You have to make absolutely massive notch cuts on everything and even then they half the time refuse to fall directionally.
And those times the structure falls as you wanted. It doesn't get destroyed more and it doesn't destroy anything in its path. Well there might be some minuscule destruction but it's so little that only thing you can think of is "that's it?"
i guess one way to say all that would be "there is no structural damage physics" that kinda brings up a question. Is this even a game about destruction if there is no structural damage?
The fire was pretty decent though. Fun for few minutes.
Overall i found the sandbox experience to be fun for a very limited time. Workshop stuff can extent that by like 5 minutes.
Lastly there is the elephant in the room, performance.
Yes the game runs like absolute ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. I read somewhere that it only runs on single cpu core and that it can't be fixed. i'm not sure if that is true, but i know many other games run physics on single cpu core as well so it makes sense. So it's not the lack of gpu that makes the game fps bad, it's that the physics are too much for many systems as they run on a single core.
After all, i found Teardown to be mostly mixture of boring and frustrating, with subpar performance. Can't recommend.
