PC-style simulations seem to be getting more and more popular on Xbox and PlayStation, and much like its predecessors, Demolish & Build 3 offers a series of locations in which we can run a company that constructs and destructs buildings.
You play as an owner of a construction/demolition company, with various tools and construction vehicles & machines at your disposal. These include bulldozers, cranes and excavators.
The game gets off to a bad start as the screen on which you are presumably supposed to be able to edit your company and CEO name doesn't work, but the default is "Demolish & Build" and your gamertag, so it isn't too bad.
D&B3 game offers various construction & demolition tools and 4 machines. You manage your company and make financial decisions regarding new equipment and which contracts to take on–you'll need the bigger machines (a track loader and an excavator) in order to take on bigger contracts.
As soon as you accept a contract there's another disappointment–unlike previous Demolish & Build games you don't drive to the job site in an open world, you're "beamed" straight there with the equipment you selected in the preparation screen.
I found the game to be constantly fussy and pernickety about placement of objects and how close you need to be to enter a vehicle or hammer (construct) something. If that was the game's only physical problem I'd have been happy enough with it, I literally LOVE big machines and construction vehicles. The next problem is the proliferation of "gravity fails" – where a section of wooden building, bricks or a lump of concrete should fall to the ground but don't. This happens a LOT.
The game has a good stab at simulating digging and moving soil, but it goes WAY over the top and exhibits some horrible glitches with texture stretching when you pile soil, which also forms unrealistically steep peaks. I did however appreciate a rather clever laser levelling system, which is featured in several soil removal/ground levelling jobs.
Another particularly hideous graphical glitch that made a small clump of weeds appear to be the size of the entire length of the building lot was a real eye-catcher (see screenshot). At this point I began to wonder if Demolish Games' QA team ever actually loaded or played the Xbox port.
You'll also find that control bindings that you change don't save so you have to accept the inverted (flight sim) controls or change them every single time you play. The audio settings get forgotten too. Are we seriously supposed to believe that this game was beta tested?
On the upside, the movements of the various booms, arms and buckets of the machines are very realistic, and so are the controls (which may have you questioning your eye-hand coordination initially) which are complex but make sense eventually.
The well-modelled vehicles, a driver whose hands, arms and feet move realistically in time with the levers and pedals, and some really good exhaust smoke & dust effects are the visual highlights. Naturally all that good stuff couldn't continue and there are some hilariously bad tool attachments for the various vehicles–the excavator jackhammer has to be seen to be believed, I lost the saw blade from the skid steer attachment altogether, most heads or buckets seem loosely attached with elastic, and to add insult to industrial injury the handheld electricity detector didn't work AT ALL!
The handling and movement of the vehicles are ok, and the complex controls manageable, but the physics are all wrong. The first instance was a 3-ton skid-steer getting stuck on a black trash bag, the worst was a 300hp 11-ton track loader getting stuck on a pile of dirt. Fortunately this occurrence was obviously so common that the devs thought to include a vehicle reset ability, at the cost of $50‐$200! You can even get stuck when on foot as they included a reset for that as well! The vehicles all seem rather underpowered–the track loader in particular, which you would expect to be a powerhouse beast of a machine, wouldn't pull the skin off a rice pudding.
On every job you have a brief planning phase in which you have to assign the tools required to complete the job. While I can see the sense in assigning things like the Track Loader, the Skid-Steer, the Concrete Mixer or the two excavators, should you really have to select a hammer, trowel, shovel or ladder? What self-respecting contractor wouldn't ALWAYS carry these tools on his truck?
Gravity fails aren't just an occasional occurrence as in our favourite demolition games such as Red Faction Guerilla and Teardown... Demolishing a 3-floor parking structure sounded like fun, so I removed 40 columns plus the central stairway… And two floors just sat there swaying gently in the wind, with some floor sections bouncing up and down like they were on springs or elastic!
As I mentioned earlier, the game doesn't remember settings, whether they're controller mapping changes or audio, so it came as no surprise that there is no mid-mission game save either, which is ridiculous, pathetic and annoying given that some jobs can take several hours to complete properly.
I even managed to bug up the tutorial level by dropping a concrete slab in the wrong place, the game simply wouldn't accept that I'd repositioned it correctly so the only way forward was backward, by restarting.
The career supplies a rather limited selection of jobs, which recur sooner than I expected. The best of these was a junkyard job, sorting various car wrecks by colour and loading them into a car crusher with your excavator, but even this was spoiled by a grab attachment that has the grip of an arthritic octogenarian. The worst was without doubt the defiantly levitating multi-storey garage, which took at least a couple of hours to demolish...
To put the cherry on the top of this mess, you will receive no achievements for all your hard work because they're glitched (on PC too I believe) and the developer either couldn't be arsed to fix them or couldn't fix them (they have claimed to have done several updates, but still no achievements.)
A final warning to those who have family play on their Xbox. Using a different profile DOES NOT make a separate Demolish & Build game save, so if "Dad" let's "little Timmy" have a go (or vice-versa) and start his own game it'd overwrite all his hard work! This is just one more shocking error by the developers and another indicator that they never played the game on console.
D&B3 is a port of a 2024 PC game but looks older. Compare this to last year's vastly superior looking Roadcraft, which looks like a couple of generational gaps graphically, not 12 months. I actually reviewed Demolish & Build Classic which, while looking older and having a few of its own glitches, was a much better game with an open world feel and many more vehicles and machines to use.
Few games of late have been so satisfying and frustrating in similar measures. When it works D&B3 is an excellent, if rather aged-looking sim, when things go wrong it's infuriating and disappointing... Let's hope the developers can fix it, because as it stands, even at a price of £14.99, Demolish & Build 3 will most likely be a disappointing experience.
Thanks to Demolish Games, Gaming Factory S.A., PressEngine