Deconstruction Simulator Review: A Deep Dive Into a Gloriously Broken, Addictive Mess

I came to smash things. I stayed for the broken economy, the infuriating bugs, and the zen of playing van Tetris. Honestly, it was one hell of a ride.

Every so often, a game comes along that is so perfectly, beautifully janky that you can't help but fall in love with it. Deconstruction Simulator is one of those games. It’s a glorious mess of brilliant ideas, satisfying physics, and a laundry list of bugs and baffling design choices that would be unforgivable in any other context. It’s the kind of game that will make you scream in frustration one minute and lose yourself for five hours the next. It’s a true simulator, not just of demolition, but of running a small business that is constantly on the verge of collapse.

The Catharsis of Chaos

Let's start with the main event: the destruction. And let me tell you, it's fucking magnificent. The physics engine here does some serious work. Smashing through a plaster wall with your sledgehammer, seeing the dust kick up and the studs revealed beneath, feels incredible. It takes a few too many hits in the early game, turning you into a sweaty mess, but the feedback is solid.

The real joy, however, comes when you can finally afford to rent the wrecking ball. Unleashing that thing on a suburban house is a moment of pure, unadulterated bliss. Watching a building realistically crumble and collapse in on itself is a spectacle of chaotic beauty. But the game also offers a quieter, more methodical path. You can meticulously unscrew every hinge and bracket, carefully dismantling furniture and fixtures to salvage them. This duality of brute force versus careful planning is the game’s strongest mechanical hook.

The Art of van Tetris

Of course, once you've salvaged a pristine, non-smashed toilet, you have to get it back to your warehouse. This is where the game introduces its cruelest minigame: Van Tetris. Your starting vehicle is laughably small, and you'll spend an absurd amount of time trying to perfectly arrange sofas, refrigerators, and pallets of bricks to maximize your haul.

This would be a fun puzzle, except for one infuriating problem: you can't rotate items on all three axes. You'll have a giant slab of drywall that would clearly fit if you could just lay it flat, but the game won't let you. You're forced to prop it up at a weird angle, wasting precious space. Add to this the bizarre physics that can cause items to bounce around like they’re made of styrofoam, and you have a recipe for a genuine aneurysm. It’s a system that feels deliberately designed to piss you off.

Running a Business on Hard Mode

The business simulation is where the game's janky charm truly blossoms into a full-blown nightmare. The economy is, to put it mildly, completely fucked. You’ll be offered contracts that pay less than the rental fee for the equipment needed to complete them. I was offered $600 to demolish a house that required a $600 wrecking ball, meaning my reward for a hard day's work was literally zero.

Your main source of income, especially early on, isn't from salvaging priceless antiques; it's from bagging up garbage for recycling. This completely unbalances the core choice of the game. Why spend 20 minutes carefully dismantling a kitchen when it's faster and more profitable to just smash it all to bits and sell the debris?

This is all funneled through your warehouse, which is a genuinely cool feature. You can expand it, buy storage racks, and hoard all the junk you salvage. But you can't just sell it. You have to wait for specific "orders" to come in on your computer. This often leaves you with a warehouse full of toilets and no one to sell them to, while a buyer is desperately offering top dollar for a common chair you haven't seen in six contracts. It's convoluted and feels designed to halt your progress.

A House Built on Unstable Ground

Now, let's talk about the bugs. This game is held together with digital chewing gum and prayer. The most heinous of all is a bug that can cause your carefully salvaged items to simply vanish. I spent an hour loading my van with valuable copper pipes and a client's specific requested items, drove back to my warehouse, and when I returned to the site, half the stuff I’d left behind had disappeared into the void. It’s a progress-killing, soul-crushing bug that needs to be priority number one for the developers.

Beyond that, the technical state is a lottery. The game is prone to crashing, settings have a habit of resetting themselves, and the performance, which was apparently fine in the demo, can be stuttery and blurry now. Even the physics, as great as they are, can break, leaving half a roof just floating in mid-air after you've demolished everything beneath it.

The Verdict

So, after all of that, should you play it? Honestly, I don't know. I have a love-hate relationship with this game. It is an addictive, satisfying, and unique simulator at its core. The developers are clearly passionate, very communicative with their community, and the price is incredibly reasonable. But it's also a buggy, frustrating, and poorly balanced mess that often feels like it's actively working against you.

It’s the very definition of a cult classic in the making. If you're a fan of janky but lovable simulators and have the patience of a saint, I can almost recommend it. For everyone else, this is a game to wishlist and watch from a safe distance. There is a great, 8/10 experience buried in here somewhere, but the developers need to do some serious demolition work on their own game to uncover it.

Score: 6.9/10 Come for the destruction, stay for the existential dread of playing Tetris with a refrigerator that won't rotate.

We at NLM received a key for this game for free, this however didn't impact our review in any way.