Teardown in Tech Trial – Next-gen dynamic destruction and voxel splendor

Teardown is a very exciting title from the small Swedish studio Tuxedo Labs, who also distribute the game themselves – a classic independent product. The indie project by the small developer from Malmö, which was recently released from an early access phase of around two years, did not just appeal to us. The title, which is available for just under 20 euros on Steam, among other things, is praised there by many voices of homage, praise and chants, a remarkable 96 percent of the almost 40,000 reviews are positive. On the one hand, this is of course due to the whimsical orgy of destruction that the game asks you to do in the form of missions on nicely designed maps or that you can deal with yourself in sandbox mode, including a wide toolbox from hammer to rocket launcher.

Even more constructively inclined personalities will experience at least a temporarily blooming-destructive juvenilization of their own mental attitude when demolishing for fun – annoying everyday things like the discordant squawking alarm clock in the morning can be broken down into dysfunctional, but more easily digestible individual parts in a very satisfying way and with pleasantly excessive violence, without that you will be punished with worldly consequences as in reality. However, the extensive possible destruction of the buildings, vehicles and environments is only part of our enthusiasm. Because behind the superficially blocky-looking voxel graphics, the high dynamics of Teardown are made possible in the first place by exciting technology including various forms of ray tracing. The developers used some very interesting rendering techniques and tricks, which we want to take a closer look at below.

In Teardown you slip into the role of a demolition contractor. In the campaign mode, as the debt owner of Löckelle Teardowns Services, you take on sometimes dubious orders from weird clients in order to avoid the family business going bankrupt. This results in some hair-raising circumstances, tricky situations and even a thoroughly entertaining story – the latter, however, is clearly not the focus of the action. The game cleverly weaves together sandbox and puzzle elements and spices up the gameplay with entertaining physics gimmicks. However, the gameplay is only part of the fascination of Teardown – at least from a technical point of view, the fully dynamic destruction and the complex physics are clearly the highlights of the game, closely followed by the lighting, which is also fully calculated in real time. If you want to know more about the gameplay, we put it for you Test of colleagues from the PC games to the heart – from now on we want to concentrate on the very interesting and complex technology behind the demolition spectacle, which is extremely well documented thanks to the dev blog.