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The RPS Advent Calendar 2020, December 12thSmash and grab
Smash and grab
This is the RPS Advent Calendar, in which we reveal one of our favourite PC games of 2020 on each day. Headback to the calendarto open another door.
Hell of a racket behind door 12 of our Advent Calendar. Sounds like an entire building is being destroyed - but not wantonly. With a very intense purpose, in fact.
It’sTeardown!
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Alice0:Smashing stuff is cool, video games know, but it’s rarely practical. Years of research and development have gone into making piles of clutter fall over and explode in slightly fancier ways.Teardownhas cool destruction, no doubt, but it’s far from gratuitous. While we can smash windows, sledgehammer walls, bulldoze houses, and set so much on fire in its destructible voxel world - and we certainly will - it’s a meticulous process too.
When we enter a level, it’s a recognisable location with a clear purpose. As I formulate my plan, I start cold dissecting it, coming to see homes and factories as abstract series of obstacles and opportunities to avoid and reshape. It’s great fun, too. Like in Zachtronics games, you might solve a level in a way you can’t help but find… inelegant. Something about that escape doesn’t quite sit right with you. You can do better. So back you go, tweaking, refining, and occasionally finding grand new opportunities that massively reshape your escape. You might have no respect for property, but you certainly develop pride in your craft.
It has been a wonderful surprise to see Teardown go from being cool tech demo clips and GIFs on Twitter to, like, an actual proper game, that’s actually properly good. With perhaps a year left in early access, I’m very excited for the game it might yet become.
Graham:Alice0 touched on this at the end, but it’s so rare for games based on new technology to find a game to pair it with.Thistechnology, in fact, has been present in some form in other games, and it’s always been a gimmick. ‘Hey, here’s a third-person action game, but you can smash stuff.’ I’d smash stuff a bit, think “Wow, cool”, and then fifteen minutes later have lost interest.
