Demolish & Build Classic Review

Over the years, videogames have evolved from 8-bit side-scrolling adventures to first-person shooters and now literal chore simulators. It may be weird that we, as gamers, want to play these kinds of games when they try their hardest to emulate our daily lives, which can be both a positive and a negative depending on our experiences as we navigate life’s daily challenges. Especially when there are so many better options out there, but maybe we do anyways, and maybe it’s fun! Whatever the case, Demolish & Build Classic tries its hardest to bring a fun and engaging demolition experience to the Nintendo Switch after initially being a PC-only game. I enjoyed various aspects of this title, but the other elements stood out like a sore thumb.

Demolish & Build Classic is a simulation game that tasks the player with exploring an open world and completing various tasks, such as demolishing buildings for cash and buying land to try to build it up and earn some extra money on the side. The primary way of traversing the world is by driving in your black pickup truck, but you will eventually earn enough to buy other vehicles for use in your projects. While exploring the world, you’ll come across several job sites and opportunities to purchase vacant lots where you can either assign a worker or build it yourself but buying the land will require you to keep an eye on it, so that should be kept in mind at all times. There is a great feedback loop of discovering job sites, doing the required chores, earning money, and using that money to buy more vehicles and upgrades. Having a feedback loop like that incentivises players to keep playing, and it did for me. I had a fun time driving around, marking locations on my map, and seeing what was next, which was all really great. However, that’s where the positives end for the most part, unfortunately.

The obvious low point here is the graphics. It looks like an original PlayStation title, and textures popping in and out of the world was a common occurrence. There were also lots of muddy textures and parts of the game that just didn’t look great. Making matters worse was how the text was barely readable most of the time, forcing me to get off the couch several times to see my next objective. That should never happen in any game, so I hope Ultimate Games fixes this for its next title, as it made the experience very unpleasant. Demolish & Build’s performance is abysmal too, and it would often drop down to a double-digit framerate, making it look like a slideshow sometimes. So all that, plus getting stuck on nothing multiple times while driving to the next destination and having to use the analogue stick to drive the truck, made for a cumbersome and ugly game to play and look at.

The soundtrack is good, though. It’s just ambient tracks and stock rock music, but it creates enough of an atmosphere and even a faint sense of eeriness that it somehow made all the other aspects at least a little bit tolerable. Some of the sound effects are super satisfying, too, and I enjoyed smashing rubble and walking on the terrain significantly more because of how enjoyable they were to do. This shows how important good sound design is to videogames and how they can make a negative experience slightly more enjoyable because of the developer’s attention to detail.

But even with the attention to detail and the eerie soundtrack, this game has other problems. The addition of a gas meter to every vehicle is a puzzling inclusion, and while it makes sense in terms of realism, it just makes traversing the world even more of a hassle because you constantly have to monitor your fuel gauge while trying your hardest not to get stuck. If you do get stuck, you’ll ultimately have to walk to a vehicle delivery point and spend your hard-earned cash or buy some fuel. Another problem is how empty the world feels; it creates a sense of uneasiness because of the ambient music and unintentional retro visuals, but there is no sense of place, and being dropped into this game didn’t make me care about its world at all. Not that something like this needs an amazing story, but it would’ve improved the experience and led to more players seeing it to the end. I finished it, of course, but there were some points during my playthrough where it was starting to drag, and I was looking forward to putting it down. Whenever a game makes the player say something like that, it’s never good.

Demolish & Build Classic is buggy, somewhat poorly controlled, and hard to look at, but it’s nowhere near terrible. It's honestly just dumb fun, and demolishing buildings with satisfying sound effects and spooky music made the experience kind of enjoyable. I’d still like to see some improvements in the graphics, performance, and readability of the text, but it definitely wasn’t an atrocious experience. I still had a hard time getting through a lot of it, though, so if a reviewer says that after completing a game, it’s bad. But it’s not the worst release ever, like some people have made it out to be, and I’m looking forward to the developer’s next project.