Teardown

I didn’t expect Teardown to play as well as it does on Steam Deck. Its voxels may deceive you into thinking it doesn’t require too much graphical horsepower, but Teardown’s premise as an absurdly addictive demolition simulator means it can throw enough particles on screen to tank the framerate and then some. But fortunately, the game runs really well on Deck. I’ve no doubt you could get yourself into some explosive scenarios that might give the Deck’s AMD-powered APU a bit of a scare. But honestly, you’d likely encounter that issue on a full-featured PC anyway since the game is kind of tempting stability often. One might even consider it part of its charm.

Teardown’s main appeal is the destruction of buildings—tearing them down, literally, block by block. But don’t dismiss this title as a one trick pony. Some of the thrills come just from destroying and blowing shit up. Okay, well, maybe most of the thrills. There’s a dash of platforming here and there on missions that ask you to complete objectives in a limited amount of time, and there are other scenarios that’ll test your reflexes pretty heavily.

And because Teardown’s performance on the Steam Deck is so great, you can really just get lost in the sandbox and have a great time messing around. Like No Man’s Sky, this one might have some hitches and stutters, but again, it’s not enough to impede the actual experience. Besides, when you do cause the framerate to tank because you had to load up a building with explosive tanks nestled in a bunch of wooden boxes you set on fire, well, it sort of feels like you deserved it.

Teardown can be a pretty relaxing game, perhaps surprisingly so for a game with the option for spontaneous property destruction. As a result, it’s the first game of this list that I played on the Deck until the battery died.