Instead of fixing up someone's run-down house in another creative zen game from the developer site Friv2Online Games Studio, sometimes you want to tear down the walls, sweep the interior across the lawn, and bulldoze the ruins just to be sure. All this is possible in Teardown, a project by Swedish indie studio Tuxedo Labs.
The Teardown world was created specifically to give players the opportunity to destroy it. It consists entirely of voxels, but not the usual massive cubes that distinguish most modern construction sandboxes, but of many small fragments that obey the in-game physics.
When you find yourself in this world for the first time, you may get the feeling that you are contemplating another screenshot from Minecraft with ray tracing, made in a modded build. And then it turns out that it's not a screenshot at all, the friv game has already started, and the character is obediently waiting for commands.
Just so you understand, the cubes in Teardown are so small that you can, for example, use them to mark the density and roughness of a lawn or build a detailed copy of a car of a famous brand and its proportions will be true to the avatar. In other words, their dimensions are modest enough to make even ardent opponents of the cubic universe fall in love with it.
The mood of the world is dictated by the diffused light. From soft street lamps and window openings flooded with warm light, to the sun playing on hexagonal surfaces all the way to the horizon. At night, headlights cut through the darkness with dust-grained rays, drawing massive dynamic shadows, glinting in puddles.
Such a remarkable image could guarantee success to any voxel-based constructor, but in Teardown it works for their ideological enemy. The friv game awakens the hooligans in us, who enjoy not building beautiful sand castles but smashing them with pleasure. From here, by the way, organically grows its uncomplicated plot.
Under our management will be the owner of not too popular dismantling service that is in a sad financial situation. The character's mother, moral principles are not too burdened, finds for the only breadwinner in the family profitable, but illegal part-time work.
The thing is that on the outskirts of a backwater town, long ago overgrown with concrete high-rise buildings, still lives the owner of a small private house, and a local merchant plans to build on his property a brand new shopping center. The businessman is ready to pay generously if this house suddenly dissolves, and our character departs in the night to solve the first of many such problems.
The hero has his own land with a large hangar, where he shortens his time between tasks. The funny thing is that every morning the news on TV shows the result of your yesterday's adventures. It feels like we are controlling a provincial maniac, who instead of kidnapping people is engaged in serial dismantling.
In Teardown there are five not too small, not too big maps, on which the friv game will set us a variety of tasks, changing the time of day and moving the scenery. The first familiarization assignments will pass with maximum comfort and minimum complications, but each subsequent one will add both tasks and problems to the players.
For example, the second visit to Lee Chemicals warehouse for the police investigation will oblige you to act wisely, because every device to be stolen is connected to the alarm system by the owner. From the moment you pocket the first device, you will have only a minute to collect the rest and escape.
When thoroughly exploring the levels, players will discover various valuables, which their vandal will gladly steal for work needs. As you progress through the story, the game will replenish your inventory with various items for free, but you'll have to improve them for the proceeds, including from the sale of loot.
At this rate Teardown will reveal all the potential of the strange at first glance set of available tools. And it includes not only obvious things like a sledgehammer or a blowtorch, but also a fire extinguisher, weapons and even spray paint. The latter will be very useful for planning an evacuation route, when there will be no time to study the map and think.
Voxel objects differ not only in density and gravity, but are composed of different materials with characteristic physical properties - combustible plastic, hard metals, wood, glass. A steel gate or a thick concrete wall cannot be smashed with a sledgehammer alone, but you can ram them with a truck or break them with something weighty.
It is noteworthy that the cubes, representing in a bundle any integral construction, also try to imitate the properties of materials. That is, a pine tree will break voxel branches with a crunch when falling, a broken ventilation pipe will bend under its own weight, and a wooden bridge that I guessed to break off and use as a floating island to cross the canal will not go down, unlike steel containers.
The vehicles featured in each of Teardown's levels are not only controllable, but also a bit interactive - the tractor's bucket raises, the van's cargo door lowers. All items can be dragged and positioned however you like. The physics in the friv game may not be the most believable, but it is literally thorough.
Players with imagination can enjoy controlled destruction or wreak cubic chaos as they please. You need to get rid of heavy safes - bring up a truck, throw everything in the back and drown it all at once. You need to level a high-rise building to the ground - scatter gas cans around the perimeter, start a fire and blow the building to hell. Instead of leading players by the hand, Teardown gives them tools, physics, and challenges.
However, there is a downside to this splendor - Teardown is very demanding on the processing power of computers even at minimum settings, and in order to enjoy the splendor of all its features without FPS drops, you will need the most powerful and modern PCs, and it is not sure that they will cope.
In other words, if you plan to demolish a house consisting of many small physical cubes in one fell swoop, or organize a devastating explosion, using up all the combustible materials on the level, be prepared for the computer to roar, trying to calculate all the voxels involved in the destructive cycle at once, and the frame rate in the game will drop to critically low values.
Bright Teardown shows great potential. In my opinion, this is how cubic sandboxes for new or future generations of gaming platforms should look like, no matter whether they are about destruction or creation. Teardown copes with the former in an exemplary way. Maybe even better than its few competitors. But be prepared that the new work of Tuxedo Labs will be a real test for your game builds, and the friv game is unlikely to appease your appetite for release.