Teardown is a game with a simple concept: tear down things that don’t need to be standing anymore. You start the game as the owner of “Lockelle Teardown Service”, a company specializing in the destruction business. Unfortunately the company has fallen on hard times and legitimate work has dried up but luckily for you a owner of a real estate company needs a competitor out of business and enlists you to “Deconstruct” his business. So starts your journey into the illegitimate side of business as you cause a swath of destruction across the Swedish countryside. It starts off small, destroying a small house so a mall can expand but quickly escalates into destroying mansions and a small town. As time goes on you unlock more and varied tools to help complete your tasks; these tools vary from a shotgun to a sledgehammer and must be used in a variety of ways to complete tasks.

Using these tools to change the map to your advantage is a must, without doing so the later challenges will be impossible. By using the spray paint to remind you where to go as the clock is ticking down and using planks to make a bridge across to the next house after you put a few holes in some walls you will quickly find that utilizing your tools effectively and planning ahead will be the key to succeeding.

The graphics of Teardown may seem basic at first but this is necessary as the environment is fully destructible. The use of voxels makes it so everything but the ground can be destroyed, burned, or otherwise vaporized with very few exceptions. The graphics can actually be quite nice as long as the object you are looking at has enough voxels not to look like an 8-bit mess. When something catches fire it looks decent enough but this feature can put a strain on even the best gaming computers if it gets out of hand. The sky boxes look great and along with effects (like snow falling) can make for some very good photo opportunities. The light is ray traced but those without RTX cards don’t have to worry as the game will run fine with older cards.

The sound on the other hand is nothing like the graphics as the music flows well and the sound effects are perfect to what is happening on screen. There is a sound effect for everything and the fire in particular sounds very good. The music helps add to the atmosphere when you are trying to escape on a time limit and the clock is running down.

Morally the game is questionable as while you may not be physically harming anyone you are still destroying others property, stealing property and the use of weapons to do so may not be okay with some players. While the people you commit these acts against for the most part are depicted as corrupt businessmen a lot of the time you are destroying and stealing everyday people's things. Teardown makes for a satisfying sandbox with a fun gameplay loop, a well done story and interesting concept. A fully destructible environment is something that has always intrigued me as it helps add realism to the game you are playing and lets you do whatever you want; even if the pixelated voxel graphics take away from the realism.