Dust2 has come to Teardown. Why should you care? Because of THIS.
We got destructible Inferno the other week, but Teardown takes it further still by enabling
almost ANYTHING to be blown up. And while it can be a bit buggy in places, once something’s
completely separated from the ground then it SHOULD collapse convincingly, interacting
with everything it hits on the way down. Instead of just floating there in the air like in
most voxel-based games. And this map was made by Micro, who says it
took about 2 months full-time to make this map, and that it’s still a work in progress.
But it looks pretty good to me! I would say it looks good enough to be a direct
port of the CS:GO map, but that would be underselling it a bit since he has gone further with it
than that by extending the play area and by adding details that you won’t be able to
see from the playable space. And by making rooms actual rooms, which really helps to
flesh the destruction out. There’s a nice deserty bit outside of bombsite
B, which I assume he added because SOMETHING had to be there between the map and the distant
towers. And he’s connected the roads between places, even creating an odd route that leads
out the back of bombsite A and down into… I’m not sure where, but then there’s a
staircase and a door and a room inside and IT’S REALLY FUN TO EXPLORE. So I suggest
you check it out. While VR makes Dust2 feel larger than I’m
used to it feeling, Teardown makes it feel smaller. I found I got around the map a lot
faster than I was used to, plus I could easily hop up onto the roofs, which I’m sure will
give people plenty of fun as well. Teardown’s got a really forgiving movement system, making
it easy to hop up onto ledges and to squeeze through tiny gaps in things.
But the destruction does something more than to just blow stuff up: it lets us see what
the map could be like with a few extra ‘holes’ in it. It’s bizarre to blast through bombsite
A and to find yourself behind CT spawn- it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise, since
they’re next to each other. AND YET it still feels weird to be able to do it to a layout
that has forced you down the same routes so many thousands of times.
And what about this- smash through a door at long A and you come right to this corridor
that leads to short, which I always assumed was a lot higher up than long A was? But now
I think about it, maybe it isn’t. Yeah, you’ll find a lot of weird and wonderful
things as you smash this map up. This is what the bombsites would look like
if a bomb went off in them. A bomb… made out of dozens of pipebombs which inexplicably
find the optimal route back to wherever I’m standing when recording these clips.
As well as a day mode, there’s a night one and you’ll see here that he’s bothered
to light up the windows and to add yet more pretty little details to make this map feel
like a lived-in place.
And then there’s a RED SANDSTORM version that looks utterly terrifying, but it does
show how this game’s flexible raytraced lighting can hold up under silly conditions.
You can drive the vehicles seen around the map, which has shown me how awesome it would
be to try to retake B by smashing an extra hole in the wall with this truck here.
Goose is at goose, and has been lovingly pixelated. You can tell it’s a map port made with passion.
And you can see a map overview by pressing tab. You can scroll in and out of areas and
it will change in real-time as you smash this level up.
And you can even pick up stuff and launch it into surfaces with inhuman strength.
If you’ve just loaded up Teardown, you will NOT get a lot of weapons to play with. This
shouldn’t be a problem for you if you’re looking to unlock them all in the campaign,
but if you’re a serial reformatter such as myself then it can be easier just to unlock
them using an online guide, I’ll link to the one that worked for me in the description.
Once unlocked, you have unlimited ammunition to play with in these sandbox maps.
And enable For those of you who were old enough to remember
Meqon physics demos, or Ageia PhysX cards before they were bought by Nvidia, yes, that’s
what this game’s maker used to do before working on Teardown.
One cool feature is the real-time sound distortion. If you’re in an enclosed space, there will
be an echo, but move outside and there won’t be. It’s all done in real-time, and has
to be since everything in this map can change. The only limitations I found were a few indestructible
base layers and blocks beneath the map, though it shouldn’t hinder your destruction-fest
too much. Should you get stuck in an area you’d like to climb out from, you can use
planks to construct a stairway or slope of some kind.
Despite the destruction and RAYTRACING, the game runs fairly well even on older hardware.
For a while it didn’t run too well on AMD, but there has been an update this year to
improve that. And while this game uses raytracing, it isn’t as demanding as ‘proper’ raytracing,
nor does it require an RTX or Radeon 6000 series card to run it.
So yeah, details in the description. According to my recent poll, Dust2 was the second most
voted-for map that people wanted to blow up. So all we need now is Vertigo.