"You can now play Teardown in 3rd person" reads the very short, succinct update from developer Tuxedo Labs that released this week for wildly popular, million-selling game Teardown about breaking things and/or breaking into things and stealing the other things you find inside. Which, I'm going to be very frank, is a remarkably humble way to say that you fundamentally rebuilt a massive part of your previously first-person videogame.
"This also means there is now a selection of playable characters to choose from, so you can picture who has been carrying the sledgehammer around this whole time. This new perspective also required us to build out animation support, which modders will have access to, as well as the ability to create and share their own custom characters," it continues.
That's a massive change. As in, previously—and I'm sorry if I'm ruining a bit of videogame magic you didn't know about here—the character you inhabited was a floating invisible camera and some arms or whatever was needed moment-to-moment. They didn't climb things or hop over them or any of that at all. Now they can and do. Which is a pretty wild update and definitely the kind of thing they were talking about when we interviewed Tuxedo back in 2023 and realized they were just getting started with Teardown.
Reviewer Natalie Clayton called Teardown "“An endlessly delightful destruction sandbox” in the PC Gamer Teardown review back in 2022. "Teardown isn't just a tech demo—it's a window into a world where game worlds only became more dynamic, more physical, more breakable," she said. "A world that saw Half-Life 2's physics and Red Faction: Guerrilla's destructible architecture and doubled down—instead of pursuing higher graphical fidelity and increasingly static worlds."
Teardown also carried a PC Gamer award for Best Sandbox 2022, where it was called an "absurdly freeform game about stealing loads of stuff" that "also stole our hearts."
"The journey of squeezing every ounce of fun out of Teardown begins with the gratifying crumble of a plastered wall against the might of your sledgehammer and gradually escalates until you're lifting entire apartment complexes with a gravity gun and lobbing them into orbit," wrote Morgan Park.
Several years and lots of mods later, Teardown is just getting better and better. You can find Teardown on Steam for $30, though it's 50% off—$15—until October 17.
