When you first look at Teardown, you might assume that the goal of the game is to destroy everything you can see, or that you are destroying large buildings. The truth is somewhere in the middle; you are destroying buildings but your goals don’t involve destroying everything in sight. Instead, you will be carrying out different errands that require you to put your destruction skills to the test.

Teardown is a first-person sandbox game where you take the role of a nameless business owner who can take apart objects. During the campaign, their main goal is to carry out a variety of jobs to earn money, which includes theft and property destruction. At the end of a mission, you are running back to your escape vehicle as if you were carrying out a heist.

Destroying the environment to achieve goals

Destruction in Teardown isn’t as easy as walking into a property and carving a path through the cubed 3D environment. You will encounter a variety of security measures that either significantly cut down the amount of time you have or will result in immediate failure. Like a professional thief, you must examine your surroundings, make a plan, and then carry it out to ensure your job is successful.

Teardown’s biggest appeal is its sandbox nature. Completing the objective is your goal, but how you go about doing that is up to your discretion with a world of fun that can be had within the game’s voxel environments. The world can be destroyed in a number of ways and every means has an end. If you need to steal computers, you can make your way to the room where they are located, or destroy the flooring to make the computers come down to you. If you need a shortcut that takes you across the ocean, you can steer a boat or use it as a battering ram to forcefully create a shortcut on land.

You won’t be tearing apart the environment with your hands, as you will have a set of tools that you can use to break down obstacles. As you progress throughout the game, you will gain access to more tools that expand your destruction options, allowing you to pull off more creative heists or even revisit past missions to complete them more efficiently. If you need to test your plans before you carry them out, you can always quick save your game beforehand. This gives you the flexibility to experiment and restart if things don’t go according to plan, allowing you to try different strategies without having to restart the whole mission.

Successfully pulling off a mission with your creativity and wits gives you a great feeling of accomplishment. You don’t have a lot of direction other than knowing what you need to do and where you need to go, which really makes you feel like you are planning an elaborate heist. You control when the pieces fall into place, and you can’t help but feel like an expert thief at the end of a mission.

Repetitive & limiting gameplay can wear out its welcome fast

Unfortunately, Teardown does lock new areas and tools, and you have to play the campaign to unlock them. While you can unlock the new areas and tools by going to the options, it will make either the campaign or the sandbox mode redundant. You have either played the campaign enough to do what you would like, or you have no interest in the campaign and want to do what you like.

Teardown’s campaign can also feel limiting. While unlocking the tools and maps gives players an objective to work towards, it can feel restrictive when you can’t mess around with the environment as much as you’d like. Rather than plan out an elaborate scheme to achieve objectives, it can sometimes be more appealing to rip buildings apart rather than be constrained by obstacles or objectives. Working your way towards new tools and maps can feel repetitive, especially after you have spent some time in the early stages of the campaign. Breaking down your surroundings with your sledgehammer is entertaining at first, but after a while the exhilaration wears off. Even after you get new tools such as the blowtorch or the shotgun, it doesn’t provide as much variety for the rest of the missions until your toolset develops even further.

The gameplay also doesn’t have any large variations. The campaign, sandbox and challenge mode are all similar to each other, using the same tools and settings. While destroying the environment to achieve your goals is the core of the game, that is all you can do. Other than achieving objectives, you are just repeating the same heist/destroy/challenge formula repeatedly. This makes Teardown a game that is better played in short bursts, unless you are really enamored with the game’s offerings. Otherwise, it might wear out its welcome faster than you might expect as you start to get bored with the repetitive gameplay.