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Comment by yboris | Hacker News Reader

Teardown - hands down one of the most innovative games in the last several years.

It uses voxels and the game premise is destroying the environment to create an escape route once you trigger the alarm (by stealing required objects).

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1167630/Teardown/

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Looking at a gameplay video on YT (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P--c8rjcSDs), I didn't come away with the same impression as you described, or at least it doesn't really answer the parent's question. Sure, it is "fully destructible" but everything kinda breaks the same way because it's all voxels, and things like driving a seemingly indestructible truck through multiple walls doesn't feel particularly realistic.

Someone else pointed to another game, The Finals, which feels waaay more realistic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rGRoborkkw4

I just hope it isn't another Battle Royale because that I find that genre incredibly underwhelming vs. team-and-round-based gameplay like CS:GO or offline campaigns

I wonder if you'll have a different feeling after seeing a trailer instead of gameplay of the first mission ;)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ttwBelIlLv8

I'm not aware of any other real-scale voxel game out there. This one has water physics (things float), cars are destructible (you saw a construction vehicle that can take a lot more damage before noticeable deterioration), and more. Cheers!

gameplayvideos are pretty much always better than a trailer

The physics of Teardown may not be realistic, but that's not what was asked for - and the physics of Teardown are DEFINITELY impressive.

Getting it to run performant with everything being destructible is impressive yes, but at the same time the physics seem super simplistic. There doesn't seem to be any kind of deformation or elasticity nor lever action. All I see in the videos is just blocks breaking off of paper houses.

Uhhh, Physics are indeed a major part of Teardown. the breaking of the Voxels themselves may not be individually impressive, but it's the nearly entirely destructible Environment with per Voxel calculated Materials that IS impressive. Voxels can be of a wide range of Materials, giving them, well, unique properties. that allows things to be strong, weak, and all sorts of other properties. Driving a Truck through a Building doesn't leave it unscathed, actually. Et Cetera.

They are impressive on a technical level, especially given how well everything runs. However, I think that the other was pointing out that the game feel/presentation itself was a bit lacking - not having much momentum to it, or just the destruction itself not feeling particularly eye catching (even if the gameplay is fun, due to you needing to act within a time limit).

I'm inclined to somewhat agree, because you can still have situations where buildings can be hanging on due to a single voxel and will refuse to fall down, and when they do there's no sense of weight, instead they just kind of plop down. Very much the same how the cars and such also feel awkward.

It doesn't detract from the gameplay much, and it's not like that makes the game bad, but personally I think that the Red Faction Guerilla game felt a bit better. Of course, it was geared more towards presentation and had a large studio behind it, rather than being very technically accurate, so the goals are a bit different than those of Teardown (interesting setpieces vs procedural destruction).

Here's a few random YouTube videos:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n16pZxHBo4o

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXmKlVZmvRg

It is pretty awesome to see projects like either game, though! Even engines like VOXLAP were interesting: http://advsys.net/ken/voxlap.htm That's actually more or less what powered the old Ace of Spades game, which is now Open Spades: https://openspades.yvt.jp/ (not as focused on destruction, but rather having large maps with lots of voxels, a fun game)

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