Deconstruction Simulator Review

After accidentally smashing a hole in someone's house, you're fired from your brand-new job in destruction. Time passes, and you open your shiny new business, with a warehouse, a van, and everything. The story then takes a break for about 20 hours, because you're too busy trying to wrap things up by 6 PM to be interrupted by Deconstruction Simulator’s story.

Like most [Thing] Simulators, this is a first-person game, and if you've played developer Hypnotic Ants’ ship title, you'll feel right at home here. And if you haven't played it, there's an advert for it constantly on your office television.

You take jobs from the selection on your PC, then go out to the property (travelling is a loading screen), and carry out the tasks requested. That usually means levelling the building, but not always! Some jobs want a couple of walls taken down, or furniture moved into other rooms, and almost all of them request specific fixtures and fittings to be placed in the customer's van rather than yours.

Yeah, you can take sofas, bookcases, TVs, and pretty much everything. Wooden beams, bricks, entire plaster walls… because you can resell them via your PC. Unfortunately, the majority of orders will be for things you don't have — eight large windows, 12 Common-grade chairs, and a Premium-grade dresser? Looks like I don't get $487. You can partially fill orders for less cash, but that can cause your reputation to go down.

Saying that, I don't actually recall my reputation playing into anything… You need to have the right permits to take better jobs, but those are something you buy after having completed a certain number of assignments. Sure, it says you need an amount of stars worth of reputation, but I quickly got enough so I never had to worry about it.

Since you own the business, you have to keep on top of operating capital. Fuel, miscellaneous warehouse costs, better tools, new racking for item boxes… It's actually a little frustrating how disparate the price of everything is. Sure, reselling a chair for $17, I get that, I've used eBay before, but a new crowbar is $1,000? And I only received $600 for destroying a house, removing its contents, and clearing up the refuse?

Some jobs just aren't worth it, honestly. You get three offers per day, plus one which is a higher tier than you're allowed to do. Will you pick the $100 one or the $1,100? Heck, if you don't like any of them, you're free to absorb the warehouse cost and just skip the entire day.

I get that the developer wants you to keep playing and plugging away on job after job so that you can eventually buy the $10,000 truck, but do people in this line of work really get offered less than $200 to take apart a building with their bare hands? Hiring a wrecking ball crane is an optional $600 in the game, so you're losing money if you're making less than that for the job.

The amount of time you have to do the job differs, too, between one and five days. Some will charge you a nominal amount per day, so you won't want to spend too long in your warehouse each morning! The reason the work day finishes at 6 PM is because it's so dark and your flashlight is awful.

The majority of Destruction Simulator’s gameplay is, of course, taking things apart. Sure, you can carry ovens, but if you want to take the kitchen sink, you'll need to unscrew everything and pack it in a box. You could smash it all up, but then you can't resell it.

However, most of your income will be thanks to recycling. Everything that gets smashed or dropped can be shoved into a bag and taken back to the warehouse. At the end of every day, the recycling is taken away, and you're paid for it. This does offset the disappointing pay scale somewhat, but you can only fit six bags in your first van, so depending on how much time and fuel it uses to get there and back, it might not be the fast earner you want.

I did encounter a number of issues with the game during my time with it. Multiple crashes after fiddling with the settings or alt-tabbing out to change the stream I had on the other screen, for instance. When a lot of rubble is present at once (thanks to a rented wrecking ball), the frame rate drops like a rock. Missing sound effects, incorrectly labelled items, and the game not registering completed objectives…

Oh, and the PC saying that I had no windows to fill an order, despite me having plenty of windows. And a second-storey roof remained hanging in the air, because I thought that it would fall down when the rest of the building had been smashed. In my defence, why wouldn't it?

The number of different buildings is really quite impressive, with some being partially demolished before you turn up to add some extra variety. The reasons are usually in the descriptions provided by the customer, as some nice flavour text. However, I did manage to deconstruct the exact same building two days in a row from two contracts.

I wouldn't say that I didn't enjoy Deconstruction Simulator, as I got a lot of things watched, and it was always fun to see a building just bury me as I finished knocking in a wall. It's just a bit bland. If you're a fan of simulators like this, you'll enjoy it, if you need a story, then look elsewhere.