Let’s face it, blowing stuff up and breaking stuff is fun. Unfortunately, there are tons of laws and stuff that make blowing stuff up IRL pretty hard to do without a lot of licenses, training, permits, etc, which kind of takes all the fun out of it. And most games that let you blow stuff up only really let you blow up the stuff they want you to blow up. Like, if a game says that it has destructible environments, usually that means that there are predetermined types of things that you can blow holes in or destroy. The only games that do allow full destruction are voxel-based games like Minecraft, or Space Engineers, or 7 Days to Die. Even then, though, these destructible environments have their limits and often feel a bit unnatural.

Teardown, as its name implies, set out with the goal of creating an entirely voxel and physics-based game that is completely destructible. Also, unlike the other games listed, the individual voxels in Teardown are about a tenth the size of those in the other games, which creates a much more detailed and granular environment to interact with.

When Teardown was in early access, there was a sandbox mode with different maps that gave you a series of tools and vehicles that you could use to interact with the map in various ways, breaking things, blowing things up, making interesting things happen, but with no real goal other than just to enjoy yourself. Now, with the release of the final version of the game, they’ve added a full campaign mode that adds quests, characters, and a story to the game.

Essentially, you’re an unscrupulous demolition expert that various people reach out to to hire as the guy that gets things done without asking questions. You then have various specific tasks that you need to complete, like destroying a house, or breaking into a building to steal evidence, etc. These quests start off fairly simple and then ramp up in complexity, adding more layers and also alarms that will trigger and give you a countdown until the police arrive. This forces you to look at the map in different ways and figure out optimal paths in order to accomplish all the goals in the very limited amount of time you have once you trigger the alarms.

The destruction mechanics in the game are really smooth and satisfying. When you knock down a support for something, you can watch it bend, break, or collapse the way you would expect for whatever material it is made out of. Wood, metal, brick, etc, all react in different ways and require different tools to maximize the destruction.

Speaking of tools, you begin the game with a sledgehammer, a fire extinguisher, and a spray can. As you go, you will unlock a number of other things, like a blowtorch or a shotgun that will allow you to interact with the world in new and different ways.

The physics system is not just impressive with solid objects, either, but there is smoke and water that will react to the environment in interesting ways too. Like, if you set fire to a house, smoke will accumulate within the building if there’s no way for it to escape, but then if you break a hole in the ceiling, the smoke will billow out through that hole. It’s all very impressive and leads to limitless combinations of how you manipulate the various maps.

The sandbox modes still exist as well, so once you complete the campaign, you can revisit all of the areas and have fun messing with them in whatever way you want. Also, the game fully supports modding and has a pretty active modding community on Steam, which allows you to play even more community designed missions, maps, and other game modes that modders have come up with. Since the game is so fundamentally versatile, it is pretty much up to the modders imagination what types of things they can create with the impressive engine.

The long and short of it is that Tuxedo Labs have really created something impressive with Teardown. It feels like an evolutionary leap from its voxel-based predecessors and would be a welcome addition to anyone’s library who ever had the desire to just watch the world burn.

Where do I even start? First of all, this game is beautiful and poignant. It articulates the journey we all face in a peaceful, unexpected, and inviting way. It talks about growing up and leaving home. It talks about struggling with leaving the ones you love and knowing that they want you to take those steps toward becoming who you are meant to be. It is about looking back and also longing for home. It is also about yearning for adventure and savoring the moment. It is about striving to better yourself, or define yourself. It is about appreciating those who came before and honoring tradition, while discovering your own path and following your own destiny.

This game came at a perfect time for me. I recently lost someone very close to me. This game deals with loss. The loss that is necessary in life to move forward. The sacrifice that is necessary to be whole. While playing, there were moments that spoke to me so fully that I had to just set the controller down and stare at the screen through tears.

I love this game for so many reasons. The somewhat minimalistic music, composed and performed by Japanese Breakfast, is perfectly suited to the quasi-post apocalyptic setting. Similarly, the art-style of Sable is reminiscent of retro-futuristic sci-fi comic book artwork the likes of Moebius. The day-night cycle of the world goes from bathing the world in amazingly rich and vibrant colors during the day to an almost-monotone of blue and gray at night.

As you embark on your Gliding playing as the titular character, Sable, you will encounter unique characters and fascinating stories. You will learn the mysterious lore of the alien planet that you live on. As you climb, jump, and puzzle your way through various derelict ships or constructs from a different time, you’ll feel almost like Rey from The Force Awakens scavenging bits from massive wrecks of a time long passed. Helping you with your traversal is the ability to “glide” by focusing on a powerful stone that creates a force-field of sorts around you and allows you to slowly descend, rather than fall, similar to the glider in Breath of the Wild.

You will spend a fair amount of time aboard Simoon, your hand-crafted hoverbike that you can modify and paint as you go by buying new parts from Machinists at various settlements. The hoverbike is your unwavering and constant companion in your journey, much like a horse or loyal dog. It will get you to where you need to go, smoothly arcing over the rolling sand dunes of the planet, a sensation that feels pretty good in the game, though the hoverbike has a tendency to nose-dive and crash instead of gliding smoothly after larger “jumps”. This, hopefully, will be something that is fixed or improved in time.

Your ultimate goal is to attain a new mask that identifies you as a member of whatever profession or path you choose as your own. While there is this end goal, the way you get there and the path you take along the way is completely up to you. There is no “right” way to play the game, and the individual quests are usually designed with a fairly open feel to them, giving you a real sense of freedom and discovery every step of the way.

This game is obviously a passion project by the two-person team that developed it and I think that it is one to be proud of. For anyone who is in search of a game that they can just play without any sense of urgency or tension, a game they can thoroughly enjoy and immerse themselves within, I would highly recommend Sable.

MORE SCREENS

I’ve been following the development of Elite: Dangerous for quite some time now and what a ride it’s been. I have always been infatuated with the idea of what Elite: Dangerous wanted to do. The potential was astounding. The promise was unbelievable. The vision was palpable and glorious and everything that a true sci-fi nerd wanted out of a space sim game. A fully simulated 1:1 scale model of the Milky Way Galaxy? Holy crap. Every star system explorable? Yes please. A complex, simulated background economy? What? Factions that ebb and flow through expansion, negotiations, war, and politics that can be directly influenced by the players’ actions? You’re kidding. But it’s true. It’s all true, to a certain extent.

And then there were the rumors. Wild, crazy rumors that eventually, you’d be able to walk around! You wouldn’t just be locked into the cockpit of your ship, or your SRV (the deployable ground vehicle to explore planet surfaces that was released with the Horizons expansion). No, there was promise that your Commander would be under your direct control with the ability to walk around inside space stations, interact directly with other NPC’s and players alike, and even explore planets and settlements on foot! It seemed almost too good to be true.

And for years it was. But there were still the rumors that eventually, it would come to be a reality. That day did finally come, with the release of the Odyssey expansion to the base game. And holy crap do people hate it.  Something happened. I don’t know what. Maybe it wasn’t just one thing. Maybe COVID had something to do with it. Maybe pushing something incomplete out the door to please investors had something to do with it. Maybe crunch had something to do with it. Maybe Frontier doesn’t care about making a great game anymore and is focusing their attention elsewhere. I have no idea.

What I do know is that the Odyssey expansion seems to have created more problems than it solved. Yes, you can get out of your ship and walk around stations and certain planets (only ones with no or limited atmospheres, but none yet that are heavily populated or that have lush atmospheres). But what you do on foot seems to be fairly limited to either infiltrating, attacking, or rescuing various settlements on these barren rocks, or exploring to try and find rare xenobiological samples of strange alien flora.

I’m not going to go into great detail about the fact that you can’t walk around inside your own ship, which to me seems to be a huge missed opportunity for all sorts of interesting gameplay like hands-on repairs, EVA missions to other ships, more immersive multiplayer opportunities, etc. But, as of right now, it seems that Frontier’s intentions are not to work on ship interiors in the foreseeable future.

Gone also is the option of playing this new expansion in VR, which, for many, was a huge draw for playing the game in the first place. On top of that, the look and feel of the game has seemingly changed at an almost core level. The lighting is different. Stations emit a strange and unnatural looking glow. Lights are emissive in a hazy, over-saturated kind of way. Planets took a hit, too with drastic shifts to the way that planets look both from a distance and up close.

A game that once created a sensation of flying through a simulacrum of our own galaxy has become a caricature of itself. It feels artificial and weird and broken in fundamental ways. Even under the hood, there are reports that the expansion has broken the BGS (background simulation, running all the economy, factions, politics, etc.) and that much of this is due to the fact that they’ve basically divided the game into two instances that have to remain synced until the Odyssey expansion is released to consoles as well.

But the developers assure us that they’re working on it. They understand that people aren’t happy and they’re trying to figure out what happened. Currently, as of the writing of this review, the game’s expansion sits at a “Mostly Negative” rating on Steam, which is shameful for a franchise that has been such a stalwart name in the genre for so very, very long.

I can’t help but be reminded of how I felt when the game first released. I recall being sold by the fancy words and promises of amazing things to come during the crowdfunding campaign. I believed that all of these shiny amazing things were right around the corner. That the “mile wide and an inch deep” gameplay would soon gain depth. But, I feel like I’ve been had. I feel like I was sold a lie. That the ocean keeps getting wider, but no less shallow. There is more to do in the game now than there was at the time it was originally released, but with this new expansion, it almost serves as a rude reminder of all of the things we were promised that we still have never gotten. Like, with the ability to walk would come the ability to go on a safari on a strange world and hunt alien big game, just as an example.

I know that making games is not easy. And I know that it takes time to put all of these moving pieces together and make them play nicely with each other. But I also know that with each iteration of expansions, I keep feeling like I’m just being given a fraction of what was promised, hoping that I’ll forget what it was supposed to be.

I want to love Elite Dangerous: Odyssey. As it stands right now, I don’t love it, but I still hold out hope that it will improve. I hold out hope that it was pushed out the door early and that they are still behind the scenes diligently working on adding more and improved content to deepen the pool and not just widen it more. I hold out hope that someday I’ll be able to walk around on a proper planet with vegetation, animals, and the like a la No Man’s Sky and fly around in the actual atmosphere and then land and explore. I even hold out hope that someday I’ll be able to visit a planet with cities, like Earth. But I know that those hopes are as tiny and distant as the stars in the sky.

In the end, I will say that Elite will always hold a special place in my heart. It captures some mystical aspect of space exploration and adventure that no other game of its kind has ever done before or since. It is a hopeful, amazing, grandiose attempt at creating an amazing game. It has just fallen short of the mark so many times that I wonder if it will ever make it.

Here’s to hope. Here’s to Odyssey becoming the expansion that it was meant to be. Maybe by the time it is ready to be released to consoles as well, there will be a reckoning of the code bases and things will improve. Who knows. Time will tell.   But how much time? And will there be anyone there at the end?

Have you ever watched Blade Runner and wished, just wished that you could exist in the city for a while? Like, not as Deckard, but just in the background. Flying one of the hover cars around the city. If so, Cloudpunk is for you. This game is the perfect emulator for just that particular desire.

Cloudpunk caught me off guard. I dug its retro-esque voxel-based graphical style. I immersed myself in the rain-streaked, neon-coated vibe of the city of Nivalis. I loved the characters and their many, unexpectedly poignant stories. I found myself surprised by the subtlety by which the game created tension without violence.

The game was pretty great when it first released and then, the developers added first person modes to the walking and driving portions, which just made the experience even more immersive. It was almost like playing a brand new game.

Then, they released City of Ghosts, which is a full story expansion DLC to the base game. It is so intricately developed and written that it is essentially a sequel to the original game. For those who played the original, you can look forward to picking up with Rania, Camus, and Pashta, discovering the next chapter in their story. Additionally, you will also play as a second main character named Hayse, whose attitude and character is very different from Rania’s.

Not only is there a whole new story to engage with, but the game itself has been upgraded with some improved graphical effects. Notably, the faces of characters are more detailed now, with more, smaller voxels making up the faces, giving them more unique appearances. Also, the customization options for your HOVA (hover car) have been given a complete overhaul, allowing you to tweak the look and feel of the car to your heart’s content.

And if you enjoyed the moral and ethical dilemmas that the first game presented you, you’ll be pleased to know that there are many more where that came from. Even within the first few minutes of the game, you’re making tough calls about how to proceed.

On top of everything else, I feel like profits from the original went toward hiring a higher tier of voice actors for the DLC, because the fully voiced characters sound much more natural this time around, which was probably one of my only minor gripes with the original game.

Overall, Cloudpunk has been one of those games that I thought I’d play for a couple of hours, experience the “gimmick” and then move onto something else, but this really got under my skin with its unique style, chill but engaging gameplay, and immersive storytelling and atmosphere. I keep going back to it and now that City of Ghosts is here, I’ve got plenty more Nivalis to explore and enjoy.

I can easily and confidently recommend this title plus it’s amazing DLC to anyone, whether you’re returning to Nivalis or exploring it for the first time, it is quite a treasure of a game to add to your library.