When I first saw Instruments of Destruction I didn’t know what to expect. After watching one of the gameplay trailers I knew that it was a game that I wanted to try out. The game fits in the destruction physics simulation genre like a number of indie games released in recent years. While I haven’t really played any games from this genre, I was really intrigued to check out Instruments of Destruction as it just looked so fun. It may be a little light on content at this point, but Instruments of Destruction is already a blast to play as you destroy everything in sight.
The title Instruments of Destruction is a pretty good description of what the game is about. The game is divided into a number of different islands with each having three different challenges to complete. Each challenge has a main objective as well as an optional objective. When you complete a challenge you will also receive a score based on how well you completed the objective.
For each challenge there are two main steps. First you will build the vehicle that you will use in the challenge. There is a set of pre-built vehicles that you can choose from, you can save previous vehicles and use them in future challenges, or you can start from scratch. The game utilizes a snap-like feature where each component has knobs on the ends which you connect to other pieces. In a way it kind of feels like playing with Lego or other building toys. Some of the challenges require you to only spend a certain amount of money or fit other requirements like a specific weight, etc. These will have an impact on the vehicle that you are ultimately able to build for the challenge.
After you have built your vehicle it is time to try and complete the challenge. The challenges currently in the game vary. Most are destruction challenges. Basically you use your vehicle in order to totally obliterate a building/structure. Some other challenges include avoiding destroying certain structures, moving objects to a specific area, time trials as you race to certain locations, and other challenges which will test the vehicle that you built/choose for the challenge.
When I first saw the trailer for Instruments of Destruction I, like pretty much everyone else, was intrigued by the possibility of creating vehicles that could destroy everything in their path. The game is not going to be for everyone, but anyone at all intrigued by the premise will likely immediately fall in love with the game.
I don’t know exactly what it is, but it is so fun driving a huge vehicle and utterly destroying everything in sight. Unless your vehicle is poorly designed you will mow through with little resistance. This is just so satisfying. I think a lot of this can be attributed to the fact that the buildings fall and crumble in such a realistic manner. It truly feels like you are destroying a building with an oversized saw, wrecking ball, or by driving through it at top speed in a tank sized vehicle.
This is even more impressive because the game runs surprisingly well. These type of games usually have high demands for computer resources mostly due to the reliance on physics. For how impressive the destruction is, the game runs almost flawlessly. On top of this the game is in Early Access so it likely will improve even further throughout the process. The computer I played the game on was better than the recommended settings so if your computer is closer to the minimums, you may experience more issues. I don’t know if there is much more you can expect from the game in this area at this point though.
Outside of it just being a blast to destroy buildings, I was actually really surprised by the building aspect as well. I will admit that I wasn’t a huge fan of the feature at first. The building mechanic is relatively intuitive, but it does take some time to figure out how to use it. The game doesn’t really have a tutorial for how to build vehicles so you are best off just experimenting and looking closely at the vehicles that were pre-built to see how certain elements work together.
After an initial learning curve though, I really started to enjoy building my own vehicles. You can actually complete most if not all of the challenges using pre-built vehicles. The game is still fun if you just want to use the pre-built vehicles. The game really hits its stride though when you decide to make your own vehicles.
I was genuinely impressed with the vehicle building mechanic. You basically just snap pieces together to create a functioning vehicle, but the game also gives you a lot of customization options. From which weapons/tools you decide to add to the overall layout of the vehicle, you can truly create a vehicle of your own design. In a way the game kind of feels like a puzzle as you build a vehicle designed to work for the current objective. In many cases the amount of money that you can spend is limited so you need to be economical as well. It is really satisfying when you create a vehicle that does a good job completing the challenge.
To illustrate I want to want to quickly talk about one of the vehicles that I ended up creating. It was likely one of the ugliest vehicles ever created, but it was designed for its utility, not to look nice. I created this vehicle for a challenge where you had to destroy a number of structures in around two minutes. My abomination ended up completing the task in like five to ten seconds. My vehicle was launched into the air in the process, but it got the job done. This was extremely satisfying and yet I had to let out a laugh as the vehicle worked much better than I could have ever expected.
Whether you like to build your own vehicles or just destroy things, I think you will have a blast playing Instruments of Destruction. From just the trailers I knew that I wanted to try the game out, and yet I was actually surprised by how much I enjoyed Instruments of Destruction. I can’t wait to see what the game has in plan for the future. If the game’s concept intrigues you at all, I would be honestly shocked if you didn’t have a blast playing it.
For a game that just entered Early Access I was really impressed with what the game already has to offer. There are a few areas where the game could improve though.
The first area is that I wouldn’t consider the game to be all that difficult at this point. Probably the biggest challenge at this point is trying to keep your vehicle upright. Due to explosions or falling down hills/cliffs, my vehicles ended up getting flipped over quite a bit where I had to restart as the vehicle could no longer move. Otherwise the challenges are usually pretty easy as any halfway decently designed vehicle will tear through buildings easily. The game is still fun even if it is kind of easy, but the game should may add some more challenges that require you to design a good vehicle or operate it more precisely.
The other area where the game is on the weaker side is the amount of content currently present in the game. On the vehicle side the game already has a lot to offer as there are quite a few vehicle parts available where you can design a ton of different vehicles.
The issue comes from the amount of challenges currently in the game. Right now there are only 30 challenges in the game. While it will take some time as you experiment, most of the challenges could actually be beaten within just a couple of minutes. I can see replaying the challenges as you make new vehicles to try and improve your score, but I hope more challenges get added to the game as you could beat all of the challenges currently in the game within a couple of hours. I am guessing more challenges will be added to the game over time and I will be excited to check them out. Outside of the challenges the game has a sandbox mode which you can have some fun with. Unless you are really into the vehicle building element though, I don’t know if you will get a ton of content out of the game at this point.
A vehicle builder where you try to destroy everything in your path wasn’t something that was specifically looking for, but I am glad that I found Instruments of Destruction as I had a blast playing it. The game is pretty much what you would expect it to be after watching even a little snippet of gameplay. You are basically building vehicles to cause a bunch of destruction. It may not be the deepest premise, but it is so satisfying tearing down buildings and see them crumble to the ground. Building vehicles is also quite fun even if there is a bit of a learning curve. In a way the game kind of feels like a puzzle as you try to design a vehicle that will work for the task that you are trying to accomplish. The game is a blast, but it doesn’t have a lot of challenges at this point so you might run out of things to do faster than you would like unless you really like to experiment with the vehicle builder.
For a game that just entered Early Access, I was really impressed with Instruments of Destruction. If the concept interests you at all, I think you will have a blast playing Instruments of Destruction and should really consider picking it up.
Buy Instruments of Destruction: Steam
We at Geeky Hobbies would like to thank Radiangames for the preview copy of Instruments of Destruction used for this preview. Other than receiving a free copy of the game to preview, we at Geeky Hobbies received no other compensation for this preview. Receiving the preview copy for free had no impact on the content of this preview.
