Red Faction: Guerrilla dev's barmy physics sandbox Instruments Of Destruction leaves early access in May

rockpapershotgun.com:

Do you remember the noughties fan warz over which game had the best terrain destruction physics? The victors of that particular forum skirmish were probably DICE's Battlefield games, with their woozy Frostbitten cinematography and dependable multiplayer tactic of having a whole team focus fire on a single capture point, gradually reducing it to stumps of foundation. But leftier souls may have preferred Volition's (RIP) Red Faction series, the third of which, Red Faction: Guerrilla, featured a granular demolition engine that you bash apart whole bases with a sledgehammer.

Well, Guerrilla's lead tech designer Luke Schneider is still in the architecture-ruining business: his and Radiangames's latest, the hopefully self-explanatory Instruments Of Destruction, leaves Steam early access on May 10th, 2024. Here's the 1.0 trailer.

Instruments Of Destruction casts you as a test pilot for Sharpe Industries, who must travel to remote islands and outposts and level any buildings thereon using a range of excitable prototype vehicles, all of which appear to have been designed by Homer Simpson. There's one I'm going to summarise as a "buzzsaw bouquet", a tractor that looks like a centipede, and a kind of tripoddy turret on loan from Command & Conquer.

Maps, meanwhile, consist of exquisitely balanced arrangements of mixed materials that crumple, burst apart and teeter over in naturalistic ways. Each has a story objective and a high score table and a range of hidden, bonus objectives. If the game's prefabbed Instruments aren't Destructive enough, you can also create your own vehicles in the Build & Destroy campaign.

Instruments Of Destruction has been having a ripe old time in Steam early access since launch in March 2022. It's sitting pretty with a Very Positive user review consensus at the time of writing. The developers have written a lengthy post about the game's development which explores comparisons with the very similar Besiege and the rather older Blast Corps on N64.