Teardown impressions — day-one PS Plus game demolishes expectations

Teardown on PS Plus Extra is the latest day-one offering on Sony's subscription service. Kes brings you his first impressions of the physics-based heist game.

Kes Eylers-Stephenson

Published 16 Nov 2023

Editor Kes has been playing PS Plus Extra's latest day-one offering by grabbing a few Teardown trophies over the course of 4 hours on PS5. In Teardown on PS Plus, you'll enter a world where everything is destructible and your main job is to steal documents, blow things up, and generally make a mess. Kes has found his expectations for the indie well and truly blown to bits...

Teardown is another great PS Plus Extra day one game

No offense to Teardown, but the reason I sat down to play the sandbox-puzzler was because of PS Plus. The developers at Tuxedo Labs have had big success on PC, but sometimes this kind of freeform 'just mess around and see what happens' style of game is one where you just want to be set free with a controller. As we've seen with the incredible games Sony has picked out as day-one games for PS Plus Extra so far — games like Humanity and Tchia — clearly that company knows what it's doing. Teardown continues that trend because it's the perfect kind of curio that will break, set fire to, and explode any expectations you have.

At this point, I've played a few missions and feel more than happy to give Teardown an easy gold recommendation based on the first 4 hours. In the campaign, you'll be put in the shoes of some (presumably blocky) person who is in a lot of debt and lives in a workshop full of dangerous toys. To avoid prison, you are sent to go and do some heists and perform a few definitely-not-legal demolition feats for some kindly strangers over e-mail.

So, off you go to one of several sandbox levels. Early on, you'll play one that's a construction yard by a dam, and a little later you'll be in marina with boats and offices, and so on. All of them look surprisingly pretty thanks to a lighting model that gives the blocky world a genuine sense of richness. They are all filled with buildings, houses, offices, and vehicles that you can use to drive through buildings, piers, and walls.

Your objectives give you purpose — for example, you could be trying to steal some cars but find that each of them is tied to alarm. Once one alarm is triggered, you have 60 seconds to get all the cars into the back of the truck, and of course they're all halfway across the map behind several walls. To get yourself in a position, you'll have to smartly destroy the environment around you to create pathways through which you can efficiently deliver everything. That's it — that's the game.

I wouldn't confuse that simplicity for a lack of complexity, though. Everything is destructible, so you can seriously just flatten the whole place if you need to — though you might trigger a few alarms if you're not at least a little careful. Destruction is all physics simulation-based, so you can easily knock out all the wooden panels with a sledgehammer at the base of a house then watch as the whole thing satisfyingly comes down. Other materials like metal and stone are much harder to destroy, meaning you'll have to hunt for the right tools for the job.

At the heart of Teardown is one simple truth: destroying things is just so deeply satisfying. Something about the way that the simulations interact with the way you use tools — like creating bulky holes with a swing of your sledgehammer, or using your blowtorch to set a chain of fence posts alight. The game has structure, but your solutions have the freedom to get creative, and it's impressive how none of it breaks the game. Each puzzle coalesces into a moment where you find yourself thinking things like: "How can I effectively create a hole in a wall to drive a truck through without blowing the place to bits or triggering an alarm?"

With the visual feedback offering satisfying results and the use of voxels allowing the developers to give you complex results from your mayhem, it's proof that games don't need to push graphics and animations to the max to be fun. Deliver a simple concept and do it well, and the player will sure as hell make their own fun.

That is exactly what Teardown is. A simple concept delivered incredibly well. It plays superbly, is deeply satisfying, and gets its hooks in you simply by having a compelling idea. PS Plus Extra is the perfect place to play it if you already have a subscription. You can get a taste, see if the freedom to destroy is your cup of tea, and then make a swift exit if the videogame alarm bells go off for you. Boom!

Summary

Teardown is easy to recommend even based on just the first few hours. First and foremost, it's pure fun. Secondly, it uses a small sandbox world creatively to create simple, but compelling, little puzzles that can fill you with joy. Finally, it's available on PS Plus Extra. Go forth and have your expectations blasted to bits by a blocky shotgun!

Kes played Teardown for 4 hours using his PS Plus Extra subscription. By smashing things to bits like some kind of hyperactive child, he managed to unlock a trophy. Good on him.

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Written by Kes Eylers-Stephenson

Editor Kes is our resident expert in PlayStation and other gaming news. He writes about PS5 exclusives like The Last of Us and Horizon, PS Plus news, and his favorite games — The Witcher, Assassin’s Creed, and God of War — before an evening swim.