Info about Instruments of Destruction:

Official game description:
Join Sharpe Industries as a vehicle test pilot and journey across the world to remote outposts where everything needs to be destroyed, using purpose-built wrecking machines such as flying bulldozers, tanks wielding quad rocket launchers, and ornithopters with grappling hooks.  
Master these contraptions and demolish every structure in sight across two campaigns and a Sandbox mode. Deconstruct buildings piece-by-piece or take advantage of explosive chain-reactions with Instruments of Destruction’s advanced physics system.   Tackle a carnage-filled campaign filled with demolition-based objectives, then test your skills even further in dedicated high-score challenges that apply new parameters and objectives to each level. Or take a break from missions and unwind in the Sandbox mode to raze the world at your own pace.  
And don’t just destroy: build. Learn how to design your own machines in a dedicated epilogue campaign for the ultimate demolition experience. Use the in-built editor to construct devastating vehicles armed with chainsaws, lasers, claws, wrecking balls, magnets, vortex generators, and much more. Beyond vehicles, design your own custom maps and structures, and share it all with the world via Steam Workshop. 
**Key Features** 
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*   **Advanced Physics-Based Destruction –** A true physics playground. Drive through structures, launch objects into towers, and trigger epic chain-reactions that destroy everything in sight 
*   **Campaign Mode –** Take on 50+ carnage-filled missions. Complete all mission objectives to max out the three-star scoring system and unlock new vehicles and maps 
*   **Challenge Mode –** Revisit campaign missions with custom-made vehicles and all-new parameters for advanced high-score challenges 
*   **Sandbox Mode –** No limits. No objectives. Load any unlocked map and vehicle, or craft your own, and eliminate everything in sight 
*   **130+ Vehicles –** Pilot wacky wrecking machines teeming with inventive weaponry and gizmos 
*   **Vehicle Editor –** Build your own instrument of destruction. Use the powerful editor to construct and test wild vehicle prototypes that defy description. Dream it, design it, drive it, destroy it all 
*   **Build & Destroy** **–** Take on a full epilogue campaign featuring 25+ new objective-based missions designed to teach you the nuts and bolts of vehicle creation 
*   **90+ Levels –** Dozens of maps to unlock across six distinct regions. Enjoy picturesque pillaging or battle against adverse weather conditions in the middle of a tropical storm 
*   **Editor Mode –** Create your own islands and structures with the advanced toolkit and set up a sandbox ripe for wrecking 
*   **Steam Workshop –** Share your creations with the world and import other players’ vehicles, islands, and buildings from a library of thousands

Release date: 10 May, 2024

Categories: Physics Simulation, Sandbox Creation, Vehicle Customization, Custom Asset Support, Destructible Environments, Mission-based Gameplay, Map Editor, Build Crafting


- Hardware Profile: No data
Feature extractions:
- Community Price: No data
- Playtime Metrics: No data
- Time-to-fun: No data
- Player Archetypes: No data


Below are summaries of things people say about the game per category.
Each point is assigned a weight that represents how often it is mentioned across all reviews.
What players like:
- Exceptional Physics and Destruction (weight 0.99): Players consistently praise the game's advanced physics engine, particularly its detailed and satisfying destruction mechanics. The way buildings collapse and debris flies is highlighted as a core strength, offering a dynamic and realistic experience.
- Responsive and Dedicated Developer (weight 0.68): The developer receives significant praise for their active engagement with the community, frequent updates, and quick bug fixes. This dedication to improving the game and listening to feedback enhances the overall player experience.
- Overall Positive and Fun Experience (weight 0.66): The general sentiment is overwhelmingly positive, with players finding the game fun, engaging, and satisfying. Many appreciate its anti-stress qualities, good graphics, and well-balanced difficulty, making it an enjoyable experience for short or long sessions.
- Engaging Sandbox and Creativity (weight 0.41): The game excels in providing a highly creative sandbox environment. Players enjoy the freedom to build unique vehicles and contraptions, experiment with designs, and destroy structures in imaginative ways, fostering a sense of inventiveness.
- Diverse Vehicles and Customization (weight 0.14): The game offers a wide variety of vehicles and extensive customization options. Players appreciate the intricate designs, the ability to create unique machines, and the freedom to adapt vehicles for different missions, adding depth and replayability.
- Nostalgic Blast Corps Inspiration (weight 0.09): Many players note the game's strong resemblance and inspiration from the classic N64 title, Blast Corps. This connection evokes nostalgia and is seen as a positive aspect, fulfilling a desire for a modern take on that unique gameplay style.

Common complaints:
- Repetitive & Tedious Campaign Missions (weight 0.5): Players find later campaign missions repetitive and tedious, often deviating from the core destruction theme to include unengaging objectives like moving boxes or racing. The forced use of pre-built, often 'janky' vehicles further detracts from the fun and creativity.
- Poor Controls & Vehicle Handling (weight 0.25): Many players report that vehicle controls are clunky, counter-intuitive, and difficult to master, especially for certain vehicle types like helicopters. This issue is exacerbated by buggy physics and awkward camera angles, making gameplay frustrating.
- Significant Performance & Stability Issues (weight 0.22): The game suffers from severe performance problems, including stuttering, low frame rates, and frequent crashes, even on high-end PCs. Players also report issues with the game freezing upon exit, requiring a forced shutdown via Task Manager.
- Lack of Content & Replayability (weight 0.2): Players feel the game lacks sufficient content, including diverse mission types, structures to destroy, and overall replayability. This leads to the game becoming monotonous and boring after only a few hours of gameplay.
- Unintuitive Vehicle Editor & Building (weight 0.15): The vehicle editor is described as complex, difficult to learn, and lacking user-friendly features like undo functionality or clear tutorials. Players find it challenging to create functional vehicles, and the progressive unlocking of parts limits early creativity.
- Poor UI/UX & Localization (weight 0.1): The user interface is criticized for being abnormal, overloaded, and buggy, with issues like blurry text and conflicting button prompts. Additionally, non-English localizations, particularly Japanese and Chinese, are noted as incomplete or machine-translated.
- Negative Comparisons & Perceived Low Quality (weight 0.04): Some players express significant disappointment, comparing the game unfavorably to titles like Besiege and labeling it as 'trashy mobile games' or 'abandoned mess,' indicating a perception of low overall quality.
- Limited Community & Modding Support (weight 0.04): Based on limited feedback, some players perceive the game's community as inactive and struggle with modding, suggesting a lack of robust community engagement or support.
- Weak or Absent Storyline (weight 0.03): The game's story is described as bland, nominal, and largely absent, serving merely as background noise rather than an engaging narrative element.

Gameplay feedback:
- Campaign & Sandbox Modes (weight 0.31): The game includes a mission-based campaign with pre-designed vehicles and scenarios, offering around 60-100 stages. Additionally, a robust Sandbox mode allows players to freely build, destroy, and experiment without mission constraints, utilizing unlocked parts and custom creations.
- Diverse Vehicle & Destruction Gameplay (weight 0.26): The game offers extensive vehicle variety, both pre-built and custom, for players to engage in creative destruction across various missions and sandbox environments. Players can pilot over 130 unique vehicles and build their own machines to demolish buildings and bridges.
- Extensive Vehicle Customization (weight 0.24): Players can create, modify, and upload custom vehicles, with the option to download others' creations via Steam Workshop. The game provides abundant sample vehicles that can be used as templates, showcasing various designs and teaching part usage.
- Strong Besiege-like Mechanics (weight 0.13): Many players compare the game to Besiege, highlighting similarities in its vehicle editor, construction equipment theme, and physics-based destruction. The game is often described as a simplified or more realistic version of Besiege, focusing on demolition.
- Learning Curve & Accessibility (weight 0.1): While the game can initially feel overwhelming due to many parts and options, it is generally considered beginner-friendly. It offers tutorials for creation mode and aims to subtract troublesome elements for easier enjoyment, catering to a wide range of players.
- Early Access Content & Future Plans (weight 0.08): The game is currently in Early Access, offering a good amount of content for its stage. Future plans include increasing the number of stages, full Steam Workshop support, and the addition of a level editor to boost replay value.
- Indestructible Player Vehicles (weight 0.06): A key feature is that player-controlled vehicles and their parts are essentially indestructible. This allows for worry-free experimentation and chaotic destruction without concerns about vehicle damage or parts breaking.
- Island-Based Challenges (weight 0.04): The game features challenges across multiple islands, with each island containing several levels. Players can also create and share their own islands and missions, adding to the game's replayability.
- Restrictive Vehicle Budgets (weight 0.03): Most levels impose a restrictive vehicle budget, although challenge stages often feature pre-built vehicles with higher budgets. Specific preset vehicles are unlocked upon clearing certain levels.

Performance notes:
- Mixed optimization feedback (weight 0.12): While many report good performance, others, including some streamers, note optimization problems leading to low FPS despite low resource usage. This suggests inconsistent performance across different setups or specific scenarios.
- Performance issues during destruction (weight 0.07): Some players experience significant frame drops and lag, especially on weaker PCs, when large amounts of structures are destroyed simultaneously. This indicates that the physics and particle effects, while praised, can be computationally intensive and impact performance.
- Crashing issue resolved (weight 0.02): An initial problem causing the game to freeze and crash has reportedly been fixed. This indicates responsiveness from the developers in addressing critical stability issues.
- Recent FPS improvements (weight 0.01): A recent update significantly improved FPS for some players, doubling their frame rates. This highlights ongoing efforts to enhance game performance.
- GPU is primary resource (weight 0.01): The game primarily utilizes the graphics card, suggesting that a capable GPU is more critical for performance than other components.

Recommendations:
- Mixed Value at Full Price (weight 0.22): Many players feel the game is not worth its full price in its current state, often recommending it only at a significant discount or as part of a bundle. However, a notable portion still finds it a worthwhile purchase even at full price, citing its enjoyment and content.
- Appeals to Builders & Destroyers (weight 0.16): The game strongly resonates with players who enjoy vehicle building, creative destruction, and physics-based mayhem. It's particularly recommended for fans of similar sandbox destruction games like Besiege or Teardown.
- Positive Overall Reception (weight 0.14): Despite some reservations about pricing or polish, a significant number of reviews express strong positive sentiment, describing the game as 'fun,' 'amazing,' 'really good,' and 'worthwhile.'
- Performance Considerations (weight 0.08): It is recommended to have a capable computer to handle the game, especially given its destruction physics and graphics. There's also a specific note against playing on Steam Deck.
- Needs Further Polish & Content (weight 0.07): Players acknowledge the game's potential but suggest it still requires further polish, tweaks, and additional content updates to reach its full potential. Some are waiting for these updates before continuing to play.
- Developer Support Encouraged (weight 0.03): Some players actively encourage supporting the developer by purchasing the game, highlighting their appreciation for the work.
- Suggests Workshop Integration (weight 0.02): Players are hoping for future integration of community custom levels and a workshop feature to enhance content and longevity.
- Quality of Life Suggestions (weight 0.02): Specific suggestions for quality of life improvements include adding free angle rotation and shortening distance modification when moving modules.
- Gameplay Progression Advice (weight 0.02): A specific piece of advice suggests playing 'Build & Destroy' first to avoid having access to too many good vehicles from the campaign too early.
- Personal Music Recommended (weight 0.01): One player suggested using a personal playlist for music, implying the in-game music might not be to everyone's taste.
- Unclear Recommendation (weight 0.01): This point is based on very limited and low-quality feedback, making it difficult to ascertain a clear, actionable summary.

Other player notes:
- Niche Game with Potential (weight 0.08): The game is recognized as a niche product, appealing to a specific audience due to its unique nature and lack of similar projects. Despite some 'okayish' physics, it's seen as having a lot of promise.
- Good Japanese Localization (weight 0.02): The Japanese translation is specifically highlighted as being good and very thorough, indicating a high-quality localization effort for that language.
- Story Resonates with Current Events (weight 0.02): The game's narrative, involving a vaguely incompetent billionaire and faulty self-driving cars, is noted for its unexpected relevance and resonance with current societal themes.
- Uncontrollable Workshop Vehicles (weight 0.01): A significant issue noted by players is that many community-created vehicles from the workshop are difficult or impossible to control, impacting the usability of shared content.
- Desire for More Building Parts (weight 0.01): Players express a desire for additional building components, specifically mentioning independent track plates and more gear types, to expand creative possibilities within the editor.
- Focus on Editor Gameplay (weight 0.01): The core of the game is perceived to be its editor, suggesting that the primary engagement comes from building and creating rather than other gameplay elements.
- Low Player Count Indicated by Achievements (weight 0.01): The rarity of all achievements suggests a relatively small player base, which could impact community engagement and content creation.
- German Translation Needs Improvement (weight 0.01): The German translation is described as 'wonky' but functional, indicating it could benefit from further refinement for a smoother player experience.
- Suitable for All Ages (weight 0.01): The game is noted as being appropriate for children or players sensitive to gore, suggesting a family-friendly or non-violent experience.

Emotions:
- Satisfaction (weight 0.28): Players are highly satisfied with the game's core destruction mechanics, physics engine, and creative freedom in vehicle design. The engaging campaign, variety of missions, and overall fun gameplay, coupled with good performance and developer responsiveness, contribute significantly to this positive emotion. The game's ability to fulfill desires for indiscriminate destruction and provide a cathartic experience is also a major factor.
- Frustration (weight 0.18): Frustration stems primarily from clunky controls, camera issues, and performance problems like stuttering, lag, and crashes. The vehicle editor is often described as difficult or not user-friendly, and repetitive or restrictive mission designs, especially those that contradict the destruction theme, also cause significant annoyance. Bugs, incomplete translations, and unclear tutorials further contribute to player frustration.
- Disappointment (weight 0.12): Disappointment arises when the game deviates from its core destruction theme, particularly in campaign missions that force puzzle elements or premade vehicles. Players are also let down by poor optimization, lack of updates for specific platforms, and an overall feeling of an unfinished or abandoned game. Issues with physics not meeting expectations, limited content, and a small, inactive community also contribute to this sentiment.
- Excitement (weight 0.11): Players express excitement for the game's creative potential, particularly in designing crazy contraptions and experiencing total destruction. The game's overall quality, fun levels, physics, and mechanics generate strong enthusiasm, often leading to regret for not purchasing it sooner. Anticipation for future updates, content, and Steam Workshop integration also fuels this emotion.
- Joy (weight 0.1): Joy is derived from the freedom in building and destruction, the cathartic experience of smashing buildings, and the overall fun and chaotic nature of the game. Players find immense pleasure in unleashing their destructive imagination, often comparing it to fulfilling a childhood dream or finding an ideal digital anti-stress activity. The game's easy building, amazing gameplay, and great destruction physics are key contributors.
- Admiration (weight 0.03): Admiration is directed towards the developer's hard work, skill, and commitment, especially concerning the physics engine and consistent game improvements. Players appreciate the developer's responsiveness and the achievement of creating a unique, high-quality game, often by a single person, that successfully replicates the essence of classic titles.
- Enjoyment (weight 0.03): Players enjoy the chaos, destruction mechanics, and overall gameplay experience, finding the game fun and engaging. The blend of heavy equipment and puzzles, along with the ability to play the campaign and use the creation mode, contributes to a generally positive and enjoyable experience.
- Hope (weight 0.02): Hope is centered on the game's future development, with players anticipating new parts, more levels, and potential improvements. There is a strong desire for workshop integration and additional content to enhance the game's longevity and replayability.
- Confusion (weight 0.01): Confusion primarily stems from the complex vehicle editor, difficulties with vehicle building, and unclear tutorials. Some players also struggle with understanding how to use mods or experience dizziness from the game's visuals.
- Relaxation (weight 0.01): The game provides a relaxing experience, serving as an excellent anti-stress activity and a source of stress relief. Its sandbox nature and suitability for short, casual play sessions contribute to a calm and enjoyable atmosphere for players.
- Anger (weight 0.01): Anger arises from critical bugs, perceived poor game quality compared to other titles, and negative changes introduced by updates. Some players express strong dissatisfaction, leading to decisions to avoid future titles from the developer due to perceived ruining of the game.
- Concern (weight 0.01): Concern is expressed regarding the silence about console versions, the game's long-term viability due to community and update issues, and the quality of translation. There is also concern for the developer's financial well-being, indicating a desire for the game's continued success and support.
- Nostalgia (weight 0.01): Nostalgia is triggered by the game's inspiration from and similar feeling to classic titles like Blast Corps on N64. Players recall childhood play experiences, finding the game to be a spiritual successor that evokes fond memories.
- Anticipation (weight 0.01): Anticipation is driven by the potential for better performance with hardware upgrades, the expectation of future community custom levels, and the integration of Steam Workshop. Players look forward to these developments enhancing their gameplay experience.
- Surprise (weight 0.01): Players express surprise at discovering a high-quality spiritual successor to Blast Corps and at the developer's story. The frequency of updates and the impressive quality produced by a single developer also contribute to this emotion.
- Mild frustration (weight 0.01): Mild frustration is caused by clunky building mechanics, an annoying or complex UI, and poor translation. Increased difficulty in certain aspects of the game also contributes to this less intense form of frustration.
- Desire (weight 0.01): Players express a desire for more features, content, and specific restrictions on buildables. This indicates a wish for the game to expand and evolve with additional elements that enhance gameplay.
- Annoyance (weight 0.01): Annoyance stems from specific gameplay elements like time trials and moving boxes, as well as from encountering other negative reviews. These factors detract from the overall enjoyment of the game.
- Stress (weight 0.01): Stress is caused by repeating missions and the overall difficulty of the campaign. These elements create pressure and tension for players, impacting their enjoyment of the game.
- Curiosity (weight 0.01): Curiosity is expressed regarding the game's future direction and an interest in comparing it to similar titles like Besiege. Players are keen to see how the game evolves and how it stacks up against competitors.}