Most reviews tell you whether a game is enjoyable. That is a fair question, but it is not the one we are equipped to answer for you. What we can do is open a game up, name its working parts, and report which of them carry the weight, which rub against each other, and which give way once you lean on them for forty hours.
The Cutaway is six people working out of a converted factory in the Ouseburn valley in Newcastle upon Tyne. Between us we have taken apart flight simulators, turn-based tactics, transit builders and stealth games. We publish roughly three teardowns a month, which is slower than most desks and deliberately so. A system cannot be assessed until it has been placed under load, and load takes time.
Fig. A — The amendment wall. Every published teardown keeps a card here until a patch closes it out.
A teardown is not a stream of impressions in the order we happened to have them. It is the same three headings in the same order, so that a reader who has followed us for a year knows exactly where to look for the thing they care about. The headings sound dry written down. In practice they are the difference between a review that ages well and one that reads as a mood.
No number at the end. We tried a ten-point scale for our first three teardowns and abandoned it, because we kept arguing about the decimal instead of the game. Each teardown now closes with one of three marks: Sound structure, Holds with caveats, or Structurally unsound. The reasoning above the mark is the part worth reading.
Four most recent, newest first. The complete set with genre filtering sits on the teardowns sheet.
Almost everything interesting in this game comes from a single design choice: guards keep a short written memory of what they have seen, and that memory decays at a rate you can learn. Every gadget, every route and every failure state is downstream of that list. We spent a fortnight trying to break it and mostly failed, which is the highest compliment we know how to pay a system.
The opening eight hours are as good as anything in the genre this year. Then the upgrade economy outruns the enemy design and the game spends its second half unable to threaten you. We can point at the exact mission where it happens, and at the two systems whose growth rates were never reconciled.
A genuinely fine network planner sitting on top of a save system that starts to buckle around the four-hundred-thousand-passenger mark. This is the clearest case we have covered of a game whose ceiling is set by a technical decision rather than a design one, and we log the exact point where autosaves began taking longer than the pause menu allows for.
The aircraft model is the most carefully assembled thing we have handled this year. Getting to it requires navigating eleven menus, four of which cannot be operated without a mouse, and none of which explain the difference between the two engine start procedures. Excellent core, indefensible approach path.
A method that works on one kind of game will quietly fail on another, and a desk our size cannot pretend otherwise. Three categories sit outside what we can assess honestly, and we would rather say so on the front sheet than have you find out four paragraphs into a teardown that never arrives.
Everything else is fair game, including small releases with no marketing behind them. Several of our longest teardowns cover games that sold in the low thousands, because an unusual system is worth describing regardless of how many people encountered it.
Your metro teardown was the first thing that explained why my city stopped being fun at a certain size. I had assumed I was building it wrong. Knowing it was the save routine and not me was oddly comforting.
I disagree with your flight sim mark and I want that on record. A hostile menu is a barrier for a week and then it is muscle memory. Weighting it that heavily flattens a genuinely excellent simulation.
We read everything that arrives and publish a selection each month, including the letters that tell us we are wrong. The flight sim disagreement above changed how we write the access section, though not the mark itself. If you think a teardown has missed something, the dispatch sheet is the place to say so, and the amendment log there records every correction we have made.
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