Teardown: Tool Tier List

This shouldn’t come as a surprise. The shotgun is simply the best tool in the game. It has the perfect balance of range, precision, and damage. Allowing you to clear holes large enough to run through without disturbing too much of the surrounding. It also has a ridiculous ammo capacity of 96 rounds when you fully upgrade it, completely removing the worry of running out half-way through setup. It’s also useful late-game for temporarily stunning guard robots.

At first the plank is rather humble, mainly useful for keeping things in place. But once you max out the length and width you can forget about stacking boxes to get up high. just attach a plank 1 or 2 stories up and stretch it out to max length. The number of planks you can hold can also be greatly upgraded well beyond the amount you usually need, but it’s always nice to be able to haphazardly spam these without the potential of being left high and dry.

The “Sledge tool” is the iconic starting tool of this game. Like Gordon Freeman with his crowbar; Mr. Teardown would feel very out of place without his sledge. While it doesn’t have the power to destroy bricks or metal, it never leaves your side. You can simply slam and slam and slam all day long with the power of sledge.

The final tool of the S-tier is the fire Extinguisher. Although I haven’t covered any of the explosives yet, none of them would be usable without this guy on your belt. Most missions contain fire alarms that will go off from an annoyingly small amount of fire. I do have some complaints though:

• I can’t propel myself on an office chair with the fire Extinguisher
• The devs missed the opportunity to give the fire extinguisher a limited amount of ammo, maybe this would have been annoying, but the fire management aspect of gameplay could have been expanded upon and made more fun and interesting.
• I can’t throw the fire extinguisher and then shoot it to cause an explosion of extinguishing solution

Bombs aren’t the most powerful explosive in the game, but they stick to the surface they are placed on and explode automatically. They allow for great precision in placement, though you can only place them on objects you can reach, and must run away before they explode, which is fun! When there’s too much for the shotgun to handle, you reach for the bomb.

The Rocket Launcher explodes harder than the bomb does, which doesn’t allow for that great of precision, but sometimes this game is about destruction, and it’s good for that. It also allows you to explode objects which you cannot reach, but at a great distance the rockets have an arc so you might not hit directly on target. So for levels where you have to destroy something far away this actually isn’t the best choice. The thing it really excels at is knocking robots over, then you can combo them with nitro or cables, but more on that later.

Ultimately every level comes down to those last 60 seconds. BlueTide lets you run faster and jump higher, which can make many levels quite trivial. Since you get it quite late in the game it can be useful in completing the optional objectives in older missions you may have missed, and just in general will let you shave of those couple of seconds you need in many missions. It’s still better to set up vehicles for yourself wherever you can, but BlueTide can fill the gaps for you.

Some vehicles are slow and useless, but with these bad boys any vehicle can become a towing machine, speedster, or rocket ship. They only fire when you press the W key however, so if you wanted to make a vehicle turn sharper you’re out of luck. You can, however, attach these to the roof and hood to provide for more grip, something you may not have thought about which can hopefully help! You do lose all your grip when you release the W key, so either don’t go too fast, or just commit.

This ♥♥♥♥ go boom. While this tool is the most blowy-uppy explosive in the game. It’s down in B tier because you just don’t get that much of it, so you have to be kind of conservative on when and where to place it. You also have to make sure you can get far enough away from it to not die, yet still have line of sight to set it off, usually with the pistol or sniper rifle. It’s mostly useful for it’s raw power, and the ability to trigger it from far away, though you have to be able to aim. You can also explode it much faster than the normal bomb’s fuse, meaning you can place it under a stunned robot to send it flying.

When you first get this item you might think “But I have planks, why do I need this?”, and while they are just strong and stretchy planks on paper, in practice they are a little more useful for towing objects (due to their strength) or just attaching them at full tension to a heavy item and flinging it. Don’t worry, they can be broken with a bullet if you ever need to detach them. and as mentioned in the Rocket-Launcher section cables can be used to fling robots do their doom

The Pistol has some very niche application, but when you do need it, there’s no other tool for the job (except for the blowtorch sometimes). Its main issue is just the range, it doesn’t shoot much farther than the shotgun. So you just end up using this to create small holes in walls to pick up any items that set off an alarm when they come off the wall (like paintings for example). Its precision is also useful for destroying things like metal railings. Though if such things are within reach you can just use the blowtorch.

The entire time before I acquired the leaf blower I was wishing something like it existed, but when I got it, it was too little too late. If you fully upgrade it, it becomes somewhat useful for clearing rubble. It can also stoke fires if you’re into that.

The blowtorch is useful when you first get it, since it’s the only way you can open locked metal doors, but becomes mostly irrelevant once you have 86 rounds in the shotgun. If you really want to conserve ammo or do some heist roleplay, it’s good for that. It can also start fires but it’s kind of bad at that, I suppose follow up with the leafblower.

The spraycan is great for those really long levels you spend 30 minutes setting up and can’t remember where you need to go when those final dreaded 60 seconds come around. The issue is you can’t undo your paint. so much like writing with a pen, your work might look quite messy when you change your mind mid-planning. It’s also just extra time you’re spending not destroying stuff or running the gauntlet. If you do want to leave yourself pointers, rather than marking the entire path you’re going to run; I’d recommend just circling entrances and exits, painting a few arrows, that sort of thing.

Weak, and imprecise. These things get completely superseded by the other explosives you unlock later on. Yeah you can spam them around, but you’ll just end up killing yourself or just missing your target. Sometimes they’re useful for setting of nitroglycerin if you’re blowing up something from the inside, but otherwise I pretty much stopped using them once I got bombs.

Useful for setting of nitroglycerin from far away. though you have to be fully accurate with your shots as you have the same number of rifle rounds as you do nitro canisters. This would probably be C tier if it had a faster firing rate and more ammunition.

Last, and certainly least, is the rocket booster. They simply lack power and are one time use. Every time I think I can use these to move a detached piece of building out of the way or something of that sort they do absolutely nothing and completely disappoint me. I always just end up using the cable instead.