Demolition Company: Gold Edition Review

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I hope you have your hard hat and steel toed boots ready, as you are going to need them. Demolition Company is yet another simulator developed by Giants Software and Astragon trying to replicate another real life job. Have they cracked it this time and bought us a decent effort or a tedious boring game? Well, lets have a look shall we.

You start of as a lonely sole employee of your own company looking to get your hands dirty and build a successful business in the demolition game. You start off with nothing but a sledgehammer and begin hitting walls down to earn a few bucks. As you gain more money and experience you begin to unlock new tools of the trade that include, wrecking balls, diggers, excavators and different types of explosives to bring down huge buildings. In Career mode, you build your business from the ground up and as you gain revenue and experience points to buy better tools and equipment you can take on bigger and more lucrative jobs.

Your first port of call is to visit the training area where you get to learn how to control and use each different type of tool and piece of equipment as you unlock them. This is a much needed area to visit as each vehicle and tool has a different use and you really need to know when and where to use them. Unless you are a real life demolition contractor, I am pretty sure you wont have a clue. As you will learn when you face larger structures, you can’t just place a bunch of explosives in the basement and hit that plunger. If you do try this, you wont get as much experience and will have trouble gaining enough points to continue. There is some strategy involved in destroying buildings, you know, that is why these real life these guys get paid a ton of money. If it were simple we would have a load of pyromaniacs full of drink to do the work. You need to learn where the best places to set explosives are and what wall to knock down so the building crumbles in a safe heap. It is not as simple as it sounds, this game does try to give you a better understanding of such matter and does a pretty decent job at it.

The graphics in this game are pretty average, they are not the best and do have glitches that are often witnessed. The same goes for the audio, as things like the explosions sound rubbish, much more like a banger being set off more than a bunch of TNT. A much better job could have been done in both of these areas. Having said that, it’s not as huge a deal here as it would be in some other games. You don’t play a game like this for graphics, you play it for the simulation.

Demolition Company does bring some strategy in to play and it does keep you interested for a while as you want to keep unlocking the next piece of equipment and get to the next opportunity to set off a massive explosion. As I mentioned before, there is an experience involved, and as you destroy things you fill an experience bar. For example, you may have the task of demolishing a building on the top of a 4 story building. As you do this, though, you don’t want large chunks of concrete falling off and plummeting to the ground. If they do, you start to loose money as the cost to clear up the mess needs to be taken into account, and as you did it, your company needs to pay.

The controls in the game are very awkward, the handheld tools are easy enough, but when you start to use the bulldozers and excavators they are very fiddly and you need to switch through the multiple camera angle options a lot to see what you are doing. This is all very fiddly, although it can be made a bit easier if you decide to use a gamepad as your controller.

So what are the bad points to the game? Well, one very odd thing I noticed was there is no real feeling that you need to move out of the way when you are knocking things down. Even if you stand inside a building as you set off the explosives, your hard hat saves you and you never get hurt. This is ridiculous and should defiantly have been sorted for release. If this game is trying to be a simulator could they not have had you leave a building before, like real life, and if you don’t you will get hurt and most likely die. I also thought that they could have possinly added some other workmen so you did not feel so alone. There are no other people anywhere to be seen at any point and this just isn’t realistic. Finally, the actual campaign is tiny, it takes about three hours of gameplay to complete, and it’s not that hard at all.

The Gold Edition comes with some extra vehicles, which is a good enticement to pay that bit extra for it, but it’s hard to recommend Demolition Company to anyone but the most hardore construction fans out there. If you are interested, see if you can find it for a knock down price.

 

REVIEW CODE: A complimentary PC code was provided to Bonus Stage for this review. Please send all review code enquiries to press@4gn.co.uk.

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