Welcome to the wonderful world of construction management. This action-packed session explores captivating topics such as Hammer Swinging 101, Buying Real Estate for Beginners, Contracts: Sheldon Isn’t the Only Lazy Person, and Driving a Bulldozer Without Running Over Yourself.
In fact, the first thing you learn in Demolish & Build Classic is how to swing a hammer. You are thrown into a small, remote town and forced to tear down part of an old office. Don’t expect everything with all the action available in Boonie. Game towns are like uneasy campgrounds in slasher movies.
That aside, let’s talk about how the game will play on the Switch.
Controls are what you would expect from a game like this. You get a fairly standard arrangement of moving the left joystick and changing the camera angle with the right joystick. When driving the truck, the left joystick steers and handles acceleration. This is where the complaints begin.
If you dig deep enough from the start screen, you’ll find a list of controls, but no real tutorial. It’s almost a ‘figure it out as you go’. Your helper back in the office will appear on video or call you to give you a new goal or contract opportunity. There are icons floating above the markers, but the game doesn’t tell you how to actually interact with them. A fragment of the landscape emerges. The level of detail for non-essential game elements is also low. When you get up close to the untouched building, it looks like skin from 20 years ago. Even important game elements are underdeveloped from a graphics point of view.
If you want to drive, feel free to do so. The downside is that the driving feel is pretty bad. The left joystick serves two purposes: steering and acceleration. If you expect the ZR button to provide an accelerator pedal, what you really get is a horn. Corners can be removed even with ZL. Who knew the horn was so important that he needed two buttons on his controller?
In addition to the awkward driving maneuvers, it’s a little too easy to hit things, roll the truck, or hook the truck into guardrails. Being the inquisitive type, I had to see what would happen if I ran from the hill to where it was beyond the property boundary wall and jumped. When I got out on the other side of the wall, I could walk through the trees. Sounds good. No, there was a wall behind me and an insurmountable mountain in front of me, so I had no choice but to go left or right. Each of the two directions I could take only got me far before hitting an invisible boundary wall. I’m out of ways. Scratch that profile.
Once you get to work, it’s easy. Just press Y and swing the hammer. There is a small circle to let you know where the impact is. You can use the right joystick/camera angle to align small targets. Again, the game is a little mushy. Hammer aiming is not very good. If you line up the aiming dot and hit only in the air, you can swing a lot. You can not only break things, but also carry and climb things.
Once the task is complete, the business person will tell you where you need to go and what you need to do next. Remember the instructions, because the in-game map is not very good at highlighting the next objective. There’s also a sort of quota radar that you can use to find items of interest and targets to get your hammer’s attention.
Demolish & Build is visually outdated and most audio components are marginally annoying. The environment and execution for the first few objectives are sparse to the point of being boring. Having to endure all of this before getting to a cool demolition vehicle was pretty daunting.
The rest of the game points like land purchases, contracts, vehicle maintenance (not to mention actually breaking things and building things) are a passion that really likes to manage details like that. It may be interesting for hardcore gamers, but the game isn’t very fun. We really appreciate the effort that game developers put into entertaining us, but Demolish & Build Classic is a flop.
Even the title shows signs of problems with the game. On Nintendo’s site, the official game title is Demolish & Build Classic, but the game itself seems to be called He Demolish & Build Company. There seems to be some kind of identity crisis going on in this game at multiple points. What’s really sad is that the issues found in this version of the game are very similar to his previous version from 2018. So obviously little to no real effort was made to improve the old version. disappointing.
