Highlights
- Open-world games like Rust and Mercenaries 2 allow players to tear apart buildings, bases, and landscapes, providing a satisfying level of destruction.
- Destroy All Humans! and 7 Days To Die encourage players to unleash chaos and destruction as they conquer America and fight off zombie hordes.
- Teardown and Minecraft offer players the ultimate freedom to destroy anything in their path, providing a refreshing and enjoyable open-world experience.
Some open-world games are quite selective in the freedoms they choose to give the player. It can be hard to let players tear apart the world they are standing on while continuing to tell a story, but some open-world games go in for as much freedom as is possible within the limits of video games, letting players tear apart everything.
From tearing apart buildings in real-world adjacent settings to destroying the homes of rival players and even mining away the very pieces that make up the entire world, open-world games have gotten very good at letting players destroy everything imaginable over the past few years.
6 Rust
Rust is a PvP experience all about tearing apart the bases of other players to steal everything they own. The soul-crushing realization that a huge base has been raided and everything useful has been taken is one of the most rage-inducing moments that any gamer can experience.
However, players can also band together in teams to attack AI-controlled areas instead. There are a huge number of things that can be built and destroyed all over a Rust map, landscapes can be torn down for materials used in some incredible crafting, and anything built with those materials can be attacked, but beware of the PvP retribution that can follow such an attack.
5 Mercenaries 2: World In Flames
An open-world third-person shooter, Mercenaries 2 allows players to destroy a huge amount as they gallivant about the map there are times when it even encourages it. Players have complained in the past about the difficulty in navigating some parts of maps in the game due to the abundance of destructible material, but the fun never ends with how much can be torn down.
For a game released in 2008, Mercenaries 2 has a surprisingly free environment, a great open world that allows players to destroy whatever they want. There are even missions like the Destruction Challenge where players will vie for who can create the most chaos around them.
4 Destroy All Humans!
Destroy All Humans!, particularly the recent remake of the game, allows players a very unusual kind of freedom as they adventure around America, looking for humans to destroy. From barns and cows in a field at the beginning, all the way through to the game’s equivalent of Washington D.C, there is almost no end to what can be vaporized.
The goal of the game is for the aliens to take over America, so it is not surprising that a certain amount of destruction is encouraged, and creativity with the various alien weapons players can get their hands on. But a different level of destruction becomes available when in the UFO, which can shoot beams that will destroy almost any building in the game, making for a highly enjoyable destructive romp.
3 7 Days To Die
A game that sought to give players a massive level of freedom is 7 Days To Die. Unfortunately for players who attempt to hide from the zombie hordes facing them down by running into buildings, the zombies can also take apart almost anything in the environment and players will need weapons to fight them off with.
Players will be encouraged to destroy huge parts of the open world around them via explosives, trying to take as many zombies as possible out with unique traps and tricks. 7 Days To Die is a particularly challenging game, but it does encourage a great level of creativity with the massively destructible environment.
2 Teardown
A game that, from the title alone, sounds built for destruction, Teardown enables players and encourages them to destroy everything around them. The player character is the owner of a demolition company who begins taking on questionable jobs while working with the police in this refreshing no-combat open-world game where horror is nowhere in sight.
In each level, players must find a way to create a path to complete their objectives quickly, tearing down anything in their way. Teardown is a massively fun, sandbox-style game that never gets boring, and the destructible voxels that make up the maps make it very neat and clinical in the style of destruction it offers.
1 Minecraft
The open-world game that delivers the most freedom to players in destruction is Minecraft, the world made up of individual blocks that players can destroy with anything from their bare hands to giant piles of TNT. The freedom in the world of Minecraft is the most absolute that it can be in a video game.
Players can choose to mine for miles, tear down the entire world around them, and build it back up in any way they choose. Minecraft manages to present the ultimate sandbox game, and with the sheer massiveness of the world around them, players will rarely run out of things to destroy within their lifetimes.