Alan Wake 2

Alan Wake 2 is an excellent sequel that puts players in the shoes of the beloved writer as he sets out on a quest to craft an intricate plot that would help to escape from the Dark Place. Its developer Remedy Entertainment is a master of creating worlds that not only look good from a graphical perspective but also have a unique feel to them. Alan Wake 2 makes good use of the Northlight Engine to power its visuals, and the PC version supports path tracing for indirect lighting which makes everything look a lot prettier and realistic than otherwise. It’s a computationally taxing effect, sure – but you should definitely turn it on if you have a PC that can run it.

Quake 2 RTX

Quake 2 is an incredibly fun shooter that also served an important role in popularizing online gaming in the 90s. The gameplay surprisingly holds up to this date, but the dated graphics from the original remain an issue for modern fans wanting to jump into this fast and frenetic shooter. Thankfully, Quake 2 RTX is here to fix those issues – and the resulting product is nothing short of absolutely gorgeous. It’s a great demonstration of how path tracing works in a 3D space, and it does a good job of alleviating the aforementioned visual inconsistencies and making the game more suitable for modern audiences.

Portal RTX

Valve’s Portal series is yet another game that stands tall as one of the best puzzle games of all time, despite being more than a decade old at this point in time. Portal meshed together an engaging story with igneous puzzle designs that strike the perfect balance between accessible and brain-tickling, which culminates in an experience that’s unlike anything we had seen and have seen since its release. Portal RTX soups up that experience by adding path tracing into that equation, and the visuals have received an immediate bump in quality. Sure, you might notice a level of inconsistency with regards to the asset quality – but Portal RTX is a great game that both veterans and first-timers should try out.

Cyberpunk 2077

CD Projket RED’s latest release Cyberpunk 2077 didn’t start out on the best footing, but the developer has remained committed to solving the many technical and non-technical issues that plagued the launch version back in 2020. The Cyberpunk 2077 we have now is a markedly different game, and one that not only looks better but also plays better thanks to reworked progression mechanics. The PC version supported ray tracing from the get-go, but the developers have added support for path tracing which can be enabled by setting ray tracing to Overdrive. The differences are immediately noticeable, though you will suffer from some performance issues if you don’t have an adequately powerful rig.

Justice

Justice is a popular MMORPG from NetEase games where you embark on dangerous missions through fantastical realms, and slowly and steadily get more powerful as you collect resources and craft better gear for your character. It’s a largely familiar experience, but what makes Justice stand out from the crowd is the astute attention to detail on offer. It’s one of the few games that leverage the power of modern technologies like path-tracing to present visuals in a way that simply looks exquisite. The reflections are very accurate, and the game is able to perfectly replicate light behavior from both direct and indirect light sources in a wide variety of challenging scenarios.

Teardown

Tuxedo Labs has done a fabulous job with Teardown, a game that lets you lose in a sandbox with a wide variety of tools and tasks to complete daring heist jobs. It’s a really open-ended game where your imagination is the only limit. It presents itself through a voxel-based art style that’s reminiscent of something like Minecraft, but what’s really cool here is that Teardown also features full path tracing for its lighting without relying on dedicated RT cores to do its bidding. It’s a very sophisticated SSAO solution that we wouldn’t be diving into too much right now, but it is definitely impressive and gets the job done decently well enough.

Minecraft RTX

Minecraft is arguably the most popular survival sandbox game on the market, and that praise can largely be credited to the limitless possibilities that it provides. Minecraft has transcended from just a video game to a pop culture icon, and the developer doesn’t rest on its laurels and continues to put in the effort to keep updating the game with new and interesting features. One such feature is obviously full ray tracing support, which essentially means the use of path tracing for all light sources and reflections. Turning it on instantly makes the game look a whole lot better, with realistic reflections and other lighting effects peppering the game world and changing the entire look and feel of the environment.

DESODRE

Built using Unreal Engine, DESODRE is a puzzle game where players are transported to a new dimension and must solve increasingly difficult puzzles through the smart use of their weapons and abilities. DESODRE has a really unique art style with its glossy textures and simple colour scheme, but a lot of what makes its art unique is the smart use of path tracing for realistic reflections and bounce lighting. Reflections are extremely precise and that combined with the high quality of assets used throughout the environments makes DESODRE a visually appealing experience.

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim is a vast adventure that thrusts you into a beautiful world brimming with places to explore, companions to meet, and things to do. It’s a very open-ended game where you get a lot of freedom ranging from the builds that you want to try out to the quests that you choose to do and even what decisions you make in those quests. Skyrim is also famous for extensive mod support, and we can enable path tracing on the game using custom mods that replace the original lighting with an RTGI solution. Switching that mod will instantly make a ton of difference to how indoor areas are lit, and the reflections also look a lot more precise than before.

Half-Life 1

Half-Life 1 was an important milestone in gaming, and it continues to be one of the most loved shooters of all time. A Valve-approved fan remake by the name of Black Mesa was recently released to some great critical reception, but graphics enthusiasts have to check out the Half-Life RTX mod by creator Sultim T. Using this mod, we can experience the deepest and darkest corners of the Black Mesa facility in great detail, and the bevy of changes including but not limited to a proper ray-traced global illumination solution and use of path tracing in reflections makes it a totally fresh experience in more ways than one.

Other titles, which will be available starting November 21st, include Superliminal and Eiyuden Chronicle: Rising will be playable on PS4 and PS5. There’s also Dragon’s Dogma: Dark Arisen, Mobile Suit Gundam: Extreme vs. Maxi Boost On, Dead Island: Riptide Definitive Edition, Nobunaga’s Ambition: Taishi, River City Melee Mach!!, and Alternate Jake Hunter: Daedalus The Awakening of Golden Jazz on PS4, which are backwards compatible.

As for the classics exclusive to PlayStation Plus Premium, Grandia, Jet Moto, Up, and Klonoa Phantasy Reverie Series are coming up, all playable on PS4 and PS5. PaRappa the Rapper 2 on PS4 is also included and backwards compatible like other previous-gen titles.

Despite the chaos, Teardown has a story, with the player focused on committing heists and acts of destruction. Sometimes, you have to steal an item and get out before security arrives. How you do this is up to you, whether breaking down walls with a sledgehammer, utilizing cranes to smash through buildings or tipping them over onto each other.

In addition to the campaign, players can also create custom levels. There are numerous mods on PC, with over 5,800 available on Steam Workshop, from environments like cities and libraries to a miniature world. For more details on Teardown, check out our review of the PS5 version here.

Having jumped into Teardown for the first time since its release, it was important for me to be eased into its mechanics and gameplay – and the game generally does a good job of doing just that with its tutorial and set of opening levels. The mechanics themselves are pretty simple, with the player just having the ability to move around and jump over small obstacles. You can also push stuff around or open doors, but that process feels somewhat sloppy with you having to hold down a trigger button and pull back the analog stick to simulate that movement. It never feels too precise, and there were multiple instances where I struggled to open doors in cramped spaces.

But of course, the real fun of Teardown comes from the destruction mechanics on offer. Players have access to a wide array of tools ranging from sledgehammers to blowtorches to shotguns and much more that can be used to bring down towering structures in no time. The destruction mechanics are surprisingly detailed, and you can use your understanding of basic physics to efficiently tear down houses and structures within moments – and that process is extremely satisfying to master.

"The destruction mechanics are surprisingly detailed, and you can use your understanding of basic physics to efficiently tear down houses and structures within moments – and that process is extremely satisfying to master."

Teardown features a campaign mode that acts as a way to take you from one sandbox situation to the next. There isn’t much in the name of a proper story; you basically take up jobs from one contractor or businessmen after another – but the game manages to add an element of light-hearted fun into the mix by creating funny situations with these contracts. For instance, you might be tasked to steal a car from a businessman. Then the next task would be a revenge plot where the guy whose car got stolen would ask you to dump that same car in the water from the new owner’s garage. Again, the story isn’t anything particularly special – but it is decently fun and never takes itself too seriously.

Teardown has a decently steep learning curve since the level of freedom afforded to you can be too much to take in at first. The first job involved leveling a house to the ground, and doing that took me over 10 minutes as I tried to level it all down using propane tanks and sledgehammer strikes. But then I took a look around and found a bulldozer lying around at one corner of the map, and using that reduced my completion time to under just 2 minutes.

The first couple of missions feature straightforward objectives, and that acts as a good way to ease you in this framework of optimizing your actions. And then the game introduces the heists – where you essentially have to steal a number of goods and make it out of there in one piece. Basically, the first thing you steal will trigger an alarm – so you have to complete other objectives as well as make it to the escape point before the timer runs out.

"Teardown has a decently steep learning curve since the level of freedom afforded to you can be too much to take in at first."

Of course, that’s easier said than done – since objectives are usually spread far from one another and they are also nested deep into buildings. So you have to strategically place cars, break down certain walls, and make all sorts of arrangements in an effort to chart a convenient path back to your escape route which covers all the required objective points.

But what makes it all so impressive is the sheer variety of approaches that you can take to complete your objective. So while I might break down a couple of buildings and use a vehicle to swiftly move between one another – you might opt for a completely different approach altogether. There were moments where I felt like I was fighting against the controls in trying to do something, but more often than not it meant that I was looking at the problem the wrong way. So when I took a step back and tackled it in a different way, I was able to figure out a working solution within some time.

Teardown puts a lot of emphasis on player agency, which is what makes each map a highly replayable experience. And the game also incentivizes players to replay these levels with additional objectives and hidden treasures dotted throughout the map, collecting which will increase your overall score at the end. It’s a decent motivation to check out other paths and improve your mastery of a particular map since you will be returning to the same locations multiple times during the campaign.

"Tuxedo hasn’t changed much of the UI and you will still find cursors and weapon wheels meant to be operated with a mouse scroll on consoles, and that makes navigation and tool swapping somewhat inconvenient."

As for the progression, you will slowly unlock new tools of destruction as you make your way through the campaign. Some are obviously more useful than others, but it’s a good motivation to keep things interesting for a while. Apart from that, you can use the accrued cash from the jobs that you did to buy upgrades for your tools of destruction. These upgrades are iterative in nature as opposed to radical, but they can certainly be valuable – so I did spend my cash on making them more efficient for my use case.

A minor issue that I found with Teardown’s transition to consoles is with regards to the UI. Tuxedo hasn’t changed much of the UI and you will still find cursors and weapon wheels meant to be operated with a mouse scroll on consoles, and that makes navigation and tool swapping somewhat inconvenient. It’s not a deal breaker by any means, but it is something that is worth putting it out here.

"Coming over to the visuals and performance, Teardown looks really great from a graphics standpoint – despite it being based on a seemingly primitive voxel art style."

Once you are done with the campaign, you can choose to walk through three sets of challenges – namely Fetch, Mayhem, and Hunted which are all pretty different from one another. Or you could jump into the sandbox mode to screw around with the environments and get a better sense of the underlying physics model of Teardown.

Coming over to the visuals and performance, Teardown looks really great from a graphics standpoint – despite it being based on a seemingly primitive voxel art style. The lighting and shading model in particular looks really great, and there were plenty of instances where I was genuinely impressed by the beauty that lies within the simplicity of Teardown’s art style. As for the performance, I encountered no hiccups during my review, and there weren’t any bugs to speak of either.

Except for a couple of minor issues, Teardown’s transition to consoles has largely been a smooth one. The game looks great, performs well, and its core gameplay of player-driven mayhem remains a literal blast through and through. It’s not a game for everyone since the planning phase for a heist is usually much longer than the execution phase, so it’s not high-intensity action all along. But if you even have a passing interest in the concept of Teardown and weren’t able to give this game a shot on PC, consider this as your cue to pick this one up.

This game was reviewed on the PlayStation 5.

"We have been working with the console makers to see what approach will work best for Teardown. They have different guidelines and requirements than Steam, so the final selection of mods will be different, but we intend to have mod support be as wide as possible."

For starters, was it always the plan to eventually bring Teardown over to consoles, or was that something that only came about following the success it enjoyed on PC?

The main focus during production was to get the game out on Steam. There were no bigger plans than that initially. Still, the idea of releasing on more platforms crept in as the project grew, eventually becoming something we discussed seriously.

What can you tell us about the selection of mods and community-generated content that will be on offer in Teardown on consoles, and what sort of content they will add to the table?

We have been working with the console makers to see what approach will work best for Teardown. They have different guidelines and requirements than Steam, so the final selection of mods will be different, but we intend to have mod support be as wide as possible.

How have you tuned the UI and controls to ensure that they feel good on a console?

We aim to have the game’s console version stay true to the PC version as much as possible. We have, of course, made some adjustments. We optimized the UI so it is easier to see when sitting further away from the screen. We have also mapped everything to the controller, keeping ease of use in mind without compromising any functions.

What can you tell us about Teardown’s implementation of the DualSense’s features? Will the game also be playable on PC using a DualSense controller with its features supported?

We have added as much DualSense control as possible. Luckily for us, because Teardown was built from the ground up in a custom engine that renders out an interactive, physical world, we have access to many inputs for creating immersive haptic feedback and adaptive trigger controls.

And yes, the DualSense functionality will be available on PC as well. However, the API on PC is a bit different from the PS5, so it will not be the exact same experience.

"We aim to have the game’s console version stay true to the PC version as much as possible. We have, of course, made some adjustments. We optimized the UI so it is easier to see when sitting further away from the screen. We have also mapped everything to the controller, keeping ease of use in mind without compromising any functions."

I have to ask – is there a future where Teardown ends up releasing for the Switch? Or are the game’s expansive destruction mechanics a bit too much for the hardware to handle?

That would be really cool. I would love to play Teardown on the Switch, though the game is 100% physics-driven, fully destructible, and completely rendered using ray tracing… so it might be a bit much for the Switch’s hardware.

Teardown enjoyed quite a bit of acclaim from critics and audiences on PC, but its campaign was one of the aspects that some felt was a bit lackluster, though the base experience was followed up by the Art Vandals expansion. Do you have plans for similar content updates in the future?

The campaign splits the community a bit. At its core, it is about problem-solving. It is essentially a puzzle game in a fully destructible environment where the player needs to find a creative solution to complete each mission instead of a single predefined one.

However, some players would like to play something more action-packed when given a fully destructible environment.

But to answer your question, yes, we continue to support and have many plans for more content updates. We are releasing the Time Campers DLC at the same time as the console game launch. This will feature the same gameplay as the campaign but in a Western-themed environment. We also have the Folkrace DLC coming out by Spring 2024, featuring completely different gameplay. It will be more of a destruction-focused racing game, so we are excited about that.

I also want to say that Teardown has a fantastic community of modders who release incredible mods to the game, including ones that completely change up the gameplay experience, so there are virtually endless gaming possibilities.

There has been renewed interest lately in the Xbox Series S’ hardware in particular, and whether or not it’s holding developers back where current-gen titles are concerned. What has your experience with the console been like during the porting process for Teardown?

Our game pushes hardware to its limit, and the Series S has been challenging. But as a developer, this is the type of thing that is exciting to tackle. With some optimizations, we got the game running smoothly on that hardware as well. The resolution will not be at the same level as the Series X, but it will still be a great experience on the Series S.

I think I should also mention that Teardown is not like any other game. Most games are limited in what you can do, making it easier to ensure that everything runs at 60 FPS all the time. Teardown’s sandbox gives players complete freedom and lets them play the way they want. So, if you want to spawn hundreds of bombs that all go off at the same time, then you are free to do that… but it probably won’t be at 60 FPS. That is the beauty of the game, though, and we do not want to limit players.

"I would love to play Teardown on the Switch, though the game is 100% physics-driven, fully destructible, and completely rendered using ray tracing… so it might be a bit much for the Switch’s hardware."

What frame rate and resolution will the game target on PS5 and Xbox Series X/S? Will it launch with multiple graphics modes?

Xbox Series X | PS5:

– Performance mode | 1920×1080, AVG 120 FPS

– Quality mode | 2880х1620, AVG 60 FPS

Xbox Series S:

1440х810 Resolution, AVG 60 FPS

No extra graphics modes will be available.

At the recent PC Gaming Show, Tuxedo Labs revealed Creative Mode for Teardown, which is exactly what it sounds like. Upon its launch on June 15, it will allow players to create whatever in-game objects they wish by “painting” them with voxels. Any objects you create can also be saved so you can use them later. Check out the trailer below for a glimpse of what Creative Mode will bring to the table.

Teardown is currently available on PC, and is also set to release for Xbox Series X/S and PS5 sometime later this year. A specific launch date hasn’t yet been announced for the console versions. You can read our review for the base PC version through here.

Teardown

Tuxedo Labs has delivered an enticing playground of destruction with Teardown, which lets you lose in complex levels with nothing but a set of tools and your imagination to pull off heists with increasing difficulty. The game features fully destructible environments with physics properties, and the game encourages you to smash walls and blow up stuff to chart the most efficient path to your objective and back to the starting point. The voxel based art style might look primitive at first, but it has its own distinct charm that will slowly grow on you as you spend more time with the game.

Destroying everything in your path to get to the object you’re after might sound easy at first but it’s rarely as simple as that. Some things can’t be destroyed easily, and require either an explosive or a vehicle to bust through, and sometimes getting those explosives or vehicles to that area is a puzzle in and of itself. So, any simple action can quickly become a multilayered puzzle. Also, some things you’ll want to leave intact as that might help you in your escape like some pipes that connect two buildings or a rooftop that makes exiting a building quicker. This requires a lot of planning and thinking ahead, which seems to be a bit of an oxymoron for a game that is tailor made for mindless destruction. As levels become more complex and ask more things of you, you’ll often spend much more time planning your escape and rehearsing your exit path than you will actually tearing anything down.

"Destroy the things, get the other things, and get out. It’s not a lot to base a whole game on, but it’s still a fun concept and Teardown handles it well while squeezing about as much enjoyment out of it as they could have with a handful of other variables that they shuffle around in different levels."

This can create its own sort of fun, but it’s not really what I was expecting a game called “Teardown” to require of me so much. The process of breaking down the right walls and forming the path of least resistance isn’t as fun as it could have been either, as the somewhat floaty jumping and finicky physics of certain objects can be… well… finicky. For every couple of minutes of enjoying myself busting down a wall or demolishing a building, there was a moment or two of just trying to get a box to sit where I wanted it to so I could reach a specific point. Even when the game was trying to let me off the leash more, I still found myself worrying about whether or not I might need any given thing to be structurally intact later, which kept me from thoroughly enjoying it.

With all of Teardown’s destructive capabilities, it is a little disappointing to see so much of what you do funneled into meticulous plotting of tasks that require more precision than the game seems built for. This doesn’t stop a successfully completed mission from feeling satisfying, but it does rob the actual execution of many of the levels of some of their potential to be wild and crazy fun. The kicker here is that once you grab anything that doesn’t legally belong to you, a timer for one-minute starts counting down. So whatever else you need to do, everything from grabbing other items to getting to your getaway vehicle, all have to fit within 60 seconds or you’ll get caught and the mission will fail.

This is where everything you’ve done so far is put to the test. Your level memorization, the paths you’ve created, everything. It can be a rather alarming change of pace going from taking your time for half an hour and planning your route to suddenly having everything on the line with only a minute to wrap everything up. It’s a palpable tension that might actually be the most fun part of the game, assuming you prepared for it. If you didn’t, you can certainly try to improvise but I found that most of the time if it came to that then I would almost certainly lose. Failing to prepare is indeed preparing to fail, as they say.

"It can be a rather alarming change of pace going from taking your time for half an hour and planning your route to suddenly having everything on the line with only a minute to wrap everything up. It’s a palpable tension that might actually be the most fun part of the game, assuming you prepared for it."

Replaying levels to get your time down creates a little bit of incentive to try them again if the experience really clicks with you, as well as looking for hidden valuables and secret areas scattered around the levels. These things don’t really add up to much other than your own satisfaction and completionism, but it does make the game feel a little fuller. You will also come across different tools that can make previously difficult tasks a little easier, but you’ll always be balancing things you want to do with what you are able to do at any given time. It’s pretty clear Tuxedo Labs has done their best to get every last drop of possibility out of this game’s exceedingly simple concepts, and the effort is certainly commendable if nothing else.

Between levels you’ll be at your place where you can watch the news and read emails that contain your missions. Nothing crazy in terms of a hub world but it is a good way to get a breather between the levels and serves as a nice way to work a little bit of a story in.

The voxel art style for Teardown makes a lot of sense and feels like a great fit for the destructible nature of the game. Not just because it makes the game run better on more modest machines, but also because it just makes the game’s many surfaces more fun to look at as you’re demolishing them. That said I did encounter some performance issues when things were particularly hectic, at one point it even gave me motion sickness which I am normally not prone to. I reckon more beefy PCs will run it better, but my experience was inconsistent enough for me to feel like it’s worth mentioning.

"The voxel art style for Teardown makes a lot of sense and feels like a great fit for the destructible nature of the game."

Teardown is a puzzle game that might seem like an action game on the surface. Yes, destruction is the main gameplay element, but focusing all of that destructive possibility into a laser to achieve a specific goal is really what you’re doing. Errors can often be solved with simply changing your own thought process, as there is always more than one way to get whatever you’re doing done. Despite the respectable job the developer has done with stretching this concept out to its logical conclusion, I still wish that there was a bit more meat on the bone and better performance across the board. That said, as it stands, Teardown isn’t a bad way to tease your brain for a little while, and coming up with wacky solutions to basic logistical problems is a great hook, even if the fun factor isn’t as consistent as you might be expecting.

This game was reviewed on PC.

Death Stranding

Kojima Productions’ latest Death Stranding might be light on the combat side of things, but in true Kojima fashion – the game is chock-full of interactive environments. If players get caught by a BT, it causes a voidout which is just a fancy way of saying a big explosion. Of course, when you return back to that location – you will find a crater that’s a souvenir of your past missteps. 

Update 0.9 of the game went live recently, as announced in a Steam community post, which has finally completed the game’s campaign. This, the developer explains, will bring “new locations, new mission types, new tools, new characters, robots, and a whole lot of mayhem”. The developer has also released a new trailer for the update, which you can check out down below.

It’s also been confirmed that the next major update for Teardown will be its 1.0 release, following which the game will come out of early access.

Teardown, in case you’re unaware, is a first-person open-world game that features some robust destruction mechanics, and players have to put those mechanics to the test to pull off heists in the most creative ways possible. It’s all rendered in a great voxel art style.