Like a bone-white ember quietly ticking amongst the feathery ash of a burned-down bonfire, Firefighting Week still has some life left in it. Yesterday, a Cornerite tip-off (Thanks, phuzz!) led me to try blaze battling in Teardown, a voxel-based demolition playground blessed with wonderfully dynamic and destructive flames.
Teardown isn’t judgemental. Want to spend an evening extinguishing mesmerising randomly generated blazes? Download and activate these two mods, and you’re good to go.
Prefer to firebug rather than firefight? Simply get busy with the default blowtorch then stand back and admire your handiwork.
I love the way fire spreads and vandalises in Teardown.
While I couldn’t find mods that reproduced phenomena like backdrafts, or allowed the base game to sim wind-driven fire and smoke propagation properly, this is the only firefighting game I’ve encountered in which blazes can bring down walls, floors, and ceilings, and reduce buildings to forlorn rubble heaps.
The Lego-like way in which structures are constructed mean collapses aren’t completely realistic, but watching burning debris dynamically cascade into a street or interior, perhaps spreading the conflagration as it does so, it’s hard not to gawp in admiration.
I suspect a skillful modder could remedy current failings like fireproof vehicles, hedges, and grass. Whether we’ll ever see Teardown fires going out due to lack of oxygen, distributing potentially dangerous cinders far and wide, or burning things like telegraph poles in a realistic manner, remains to be seen.
