I have a five-year-old son and he is massively into construction vehicles. Anything used to demolish and build gets his attention in an instant. So I put in a review request for the building sim, Demolish & Build 3 from developer and publisher Demolish Games S.A. and… oh dear!

“Step into the boots of a demolition company owner. Accept and complete contracts to earn money, allowing you to buy new equipment and upgrade your business. Use powerful tools, from sledgehammers to giant excavators, and experience the realism of a true construction site, where every brick matters.”

Yeah, I decided to review this one just because my son is such a fan of construction vehicles, I also thought that the trailer looked pretty good. Now, I know that a title like this would be too advanced for my five-year-old son to play himself, but I thought he might get a kick out of watching me play it and driving around in an excavator. Thankfully, I decided to play the game alone before playing this in front of my son. I say “thankfully” because this pile of shit had me swearing more than a builder who has just hit his thumb with a hammer.

Demolish & Build 3 is a broken, bug-filled mess. I know that some of these sim games are usually cheap shovelware that devs fart out to make some quick coin. However, sometimes, there are some gems within this sim gerne that shine. The likes of PowerWash Simulator or House Flipper have been great successes and have gone on to gain a loyal fan-base because they’re really well made games about doing really mundane things. I even quite enjoyed Lawn Mowing Simulator from a few years back. There are good mundane job sims out there. I took a chance on Demolish & Build 3 because it’s the third game, so the devs should be producing a great title by now, after learning from the previous two games. I was very wrong and I really should have checked out some reviews before I put a request in for this one.

In fact, after I had spend some time playing this and learning how awful it is, I decided to check out some reviews to see if I was missing anything, Looking on Steam, most of the reviews are negative, say how the game is full of bugs and that the demo was far better than the finished game. Having played this, I believe them too. There’s a tutorial that is totally broken. As an example, I got in the cab of a vehicle and the game instructed me to look around. So I moved the right stick as anyone naturally would, didn’t work. I tried the left stick to see if that moved the camera, nope. D-pad? Nope. Nothing moved the camera and there was no button prompt telling me what to press, just the instruction to move the camera. I eventually learned, through trial and error, that you have to hold down a button and then move the stick. You know what? The button prompt telling me what to do only appeared after I pressed the button to do what the tutorial was telling me to do. In other words, you have to know how to play the game in advance of the tutorial teaching you how to play the game. I’m pretty sure this is not a design choice and just a bug… one of many.

When I did get to play the game (after fumbling through the a tutorial that I had to know in advance of being taught) I found the controls to be very finicky, awkward and broken. Vehicles can get stuck, really easily. I managed to get an excavator stuck on a small pile of bricks, and I do mean a very small pile of bricks. Now, I’ve never driven an excavator in real life, but I am pretty sure that those massive tracks that they have are able to roll over a few bricks. When you do get a vehicle stuck (and you will, a lot), you have to pay in-game money to reset it. That is cheap game design. It’s often the game’s awful collision detection’s fault as to why you will get stuck and you get punished by having to pay for the dev’s laziness?

I have to tell you about a bit of precision digging that I had to do. As this was a more delicate job, using heavy duty machinery was not recommended and the game told me to use hand tools, like a shovel. Great, I quite like the idea of having to do smaller jobs that require a little more finesse. After learning how to equip a shovel (because the tutorial is broken and you have to teach yourself), I found the spot that needed digging and went at it. The animation showed my character dig with the shovel, there was dirt on the shovel, but there was no hole. I tried again and again, the same thing happened. There was dirt on the shovel but no hole where I had dug. I went at it a few more times and still no hole. After a while, I noticed that there was a hole… but it was being dug several feet away from where I was aiming. Quick reminder, the game stipulated that the job required “precision digging”. Those are not my choice of words, the game tells you that it needs precision digging. How the fuck can you do precision digging when the hole appears several feet away from where you are digging? Yet another bug.

I really tried to like Demolish & Build 3, not so much for my enjoyment, but mainly for my son. He would’ve loved to see big old construction vehicles smashing up buildings and such. I could hear his voice in my head directing me as I played. “Daddy smash that wall. Daddy, drive the bulldozer. Daddy, dig a hole there”. He would’ve loved it. But instead, I was left frustrated by some awful controls, broken mechanics, loads of bugs and the game had me swearing more than I have in a long time. Demolish & Build 3 is an awful broken mess of a game and I don’t know if the devs are ever going to fix it. According to several Steam reviewers (many of which have been refunded), the game is still a mess after being released in September last year on PC. So it really does not bode well, does it? Avoid this, it’s a fucking mess.