Demolish & Build 2017

My sim-specialist instincts told me this one would either be a hidden gem in the PlayWay catalog or a cash-in riding the destruction-sim wave. After spending time with it, the honest answer is somewhere in the middle, leaning unfavorably. You play as a failing company boss who does every job personally, driving a pickup truck between contracts across a small open-world town, accepting phone calls from an off-screen handler who barks orders without ever lifting a finger himself. The progression loop is straightforward: start with a bulldozer, earn cash from contracts, unlock heavier iron. On paper that sounds like a mini Tropico of construction management. In practice the decision-making depth is about as thick as drywall. The demolition side is where the game has any real pulse. Swinging through wooden huts with a sledgehammer scratches an itch, and unlocking the excavator, crawler crane with wrecking ball, and industrial shears opens up contracts that feel genuinely different from one another. The skid loader with swappable attachments is a particular highlight - swapping between digging bucket and demolition hammer to prep a site has a small but satisfying rhythm. A "Worker Sense" highlight system shows interactable objects, which keeps early sessions moving without a painful tutorial. Steam players land at roughly 76% positive across 300 reviews, which is a fair thermometer reading: the destruction core earns those thumbs, everything around it drags the score down. Here is where the spreadsheet gets ugly. The building missions - the literal other half of the title - amount to hauling lumber with a cargo truck, positioning planks, and pressing a button to instant-construct a wall section. There is no real creativity, no structural decision-making, nothing comparable to even a lightweight management layer. Players hoping for any tycoon element, like delegating contracts to hired workers or managing multiple active sites, will find the worker management is surface-level at best. The business loop of investing in land properties and collecting rent exists but adds almost nothing to moment-to-moment play. Average Steam playtime hovers around five to eight hours, which tells you everything about the longevity ceiling. Technically the game is rough even by low-budget sim standards. Crashes during loading sequences were reported across multiple reviewers at launch, and the camera clips into structures during precision work - most painfully with the industrial shears. Vehicle physics produce the classic low-budget sim party tricks: excavator arms launching the machine skyward, cargo trucks catching air on mild slopes, your character body-blocking a moving bulldozer without consequence. The world feels hollow too, with minimal NPC presence and radio stations that loop a single track per channel. None of this is unusual for this genre tier, but it compounds fast over a session. If you are coming from something like Farming Simulator expecting systemic depth, recalibrate expectations sharply downward. Who actually enjoys this? Casual sim fans who want a low-stakes afternoon of smashing concrete without reading a manual. Kids or sim newcomers who find heavier titles intimidating will get genuine mileage from the accessible controls and straightforward contract structure. For anyone who measures a sim by its decision tree density, AI quality, or mod ecosystem - there is effectively nothing here on any of those fronts. No mod support to speak of, no AI opponents, no late-game complexity spike. The destruction moment-to-moment is the entire product. Go in with that framing, at the right price point, and Demolish and Build 2017 delivers its narrow promise. Go in expecting a construction business sim with real mechanical teeth and you will be done in three hours, frustrated.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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