I'll preface this by saying I am 100% not aware of every game in existence, but:
What happened to all the good games with a focus on destruction physics?
Red Faction: Guerrilla was one of my favorite games ever. It had its buggy moments, but overall its destruction physics system was fun and satisfying.
Then Red Faction: Armageddon was so terrible it killed the entire studio (that's probably not exactly what happened but I'm going with it), so now Red Faction is in some weird legal limbo or owned by a company with no plans for it or something like that.
The next choice seems to be Just Cause. The cables in Just Cause are great fun, but the structures all feel like they're made of cardboard and mostly are not destructible. Not very satisfying and not very fun long-term.
The best option I've played for current-or-previous-gen (yeah sorry still a console peasant, working on that) was Battlefield 6, which does destruction very well but it's hardly the main focus of the game like it was for RF:G.
So... what happened to good destruction-physics focused games? Are there any out there that I don't know about?
30-05-2026 10:18:18
Yeah, I feel you on this. There really aren’t that many modern
destruction physics games anymore that go all-in like
Red Faction: Guerrilla did.
I think a big reason is just how hard (and expensive) full physics destruction actually is. It looks awesome, but once you try to scale it to big open-world games it becomes a performance and design nightmare. So most devs either limit it or script it instead of making everything fully breakable.
There are still a few games that kind of scratch that itch though:
Teardown: probably the closest thing we’ve got now. Everything is voxel-based, so you can just completely reshape or destroy environments.
Battlefield series (BF3 / BF4 / BF2042): still really good destruction in big moments, but it’s more of a feature than the core focus like Red Faction was.
Besiege: more about building crazy machines and watching physics chaos happen.
Noita: 2D, but the simulation is insane. Everything reacts and melts into each other in real time.
And yeah… nothing really replaced
Red Faction: Guerrilla. That game just hit a different level of freedom with destruction. Still kind of unmatched honestly.
30-05-2026 10:22:55
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