You take the brutalist, mechanical efficiency of Factorio, combine it with the glorious destruction of Teardown, and add maybe a hint of comedy and catastrophic glee from Kerbal Space Program, and you get Abriss, an amazing new building game just launched on Steam. With high levels of detail, individually modelled bricks, blocks, and building sections, and a frankly fetishistic focus on the intricacies of blowing up stuff, according to Abriss’s developers, its 1.0 release represents your “GPU’s most feared day.” Destruction so meticulous it might melt my PC? Sign me up.
The first part of any Abriss level is the building. Take a thruster, a rotator, and a few bombs – hey presto, you’ve just made a revolving bazooka. Or maybe you want something even more elaborate, so you strap some lasers to a rocket-powered concrete block and launch it through a loop-the-loop. It crashes through your target at high speed, blasting everything in the periphery with its bright red energy beams.
Destruction, after all, is the second part of Abriss. After building the wildest demolition tools you can imagine, your job is to demolish the architecture as efficiently and totally as possible.
The detail is incredible. Thousands of debris particles, accurately simulated physics, every single chunk of concrete, rebar, and brick painstakingly modelled and weighted. If you’re familiar with the Obliteration Room, Yayoi Kusama’s brilliant installation artwork, Abriss feels like that, but on a city-wide scale and at the convenience of your PC.
Available now on Steam, you can also try a free demo of Abriss to see if it really will wipe out your GPU. Gorgeous, gratifying, and lovingly detailed, you can get the full version of Abriss right here.
Alternatively, you might want to try some of the best city-building games, if you feel like creating rather than destroying (although if you’re a particularly sinister mayor, you can easily do both). There’s also the best sandbox games on PC, where you can make and break anything you want.