Instruments of Destruction Review

Last month, while I was working on the list of indie game releases for March, my son and I saw a trailer for a game called Instruments of Destruction. He was incredibly excited to see a game that lets you create construction vehicles to use to smash buildings and houses, so I knew this was going to be a title we would have to pick up. Maybe not the easiest game for an eight-year-old, but with some trial and error we would figure it out.

Instruments of Destruction has two modes to select from; “Play”, which has you travelling to different islands with the vehicle you created, completing objectives to unlock the next island, and “Sandbox” where you just build vehicles and destroy things. When we first started playing, we headed to Sandbox mode so we could start building right away. There are so many options for customisation that it can be overwhelming, especially when you don’t know where to start. The experience reminded me of having a huge collection of LEGO pieces and no instructions, you have free reign to create anything you can imagine. There is a build tutorial available, but it basically just gives you descriptions of all the different parts you click on. There are pre-made vehicles available to select and modify how you want, which makes it a lot easier to get started — especially if you are more interested in smashing and destruction than creating a vehicle from the bottom up. Just add a saw, some cannons, and you are ready to go!

Once you have a vehicle created, you are ready to knock down some buildings, which unfortunately feels like it's in slow-motion. Remember that you are driving a huge construction vehicle that weighs a lot, especially if you have added a lot of heavy attachments to it. Chances are that after trying to take your vehicle for a spin around the island, you will be making modifications to your design. It took a while to get used to using the keyboard and mouse for controlling the vehicle and camera, at times it was hard to get a good look at where my vehicle was headed so you will have to keep adjusting as you move around the island.

Instruments of Destruction has great destruction graphics, with explosions, rubble flying, dust, and particle effects, which made taking down the buildings an incredibly satisfying sight to behold. The physics in the game are done very well and even shooting a cannon will push your vehicle back. Although now that I think about it, when you take out the bottom of a tower, the rest of it lands directly on top of the truck, which you would think would destroy or damage it but it doesn't. I guess those layers of multi-colour paint I put on my vehicle made it invincible!

After exploring some of the available islands with no goals or tasks to do, we figured it was time to try out the Play mode. You start on the island of Draco and are given your objective to complete in the level to unlock the next island. For your first mission your objective is to destroy the tower, with the optional bonus objective being that you damage less than 10% of structures on the island while you try to complete the main task. There are obstacles that you never would have thought of while designing your vehicle like bridges that will crumble under the weight of your wheels, so you may need to make some on-the-fly changes and start over.

As you complete the objectives on the multiple islands, we found that a lot of the tasks were very similar, and once you figure out a design for your vehicle that isn’t too heavy you don’t need to change or adapt this build further. It would have been cool if you had to get creative to complete the requirements for each different island. Instruments of Destruction is a pretty short game, you will probably be able to get through it in under five hours; after you complete it, I guess you just have Sandbox mode to keep creating new builds. At this time there is no multiplayer or building creator to spend some time on. It would be neat to be able to create your own structures to demolish, and this addition would definitely make the islands look more interesting.

Instruments of Destruction is a creative game with great visuals and a lot of fun. The drawback is the deeper learning curve to construct vehicles, and the lack of unique challenges in the main game made it get repetitive pretty fast. If you love just sitting down and creating crazy builds, this game may be for you with tons of options to choose from, but if you are more interested in demolishing and objectives to complete that are challenging, the main game may leave you disappointed.