Demolish

You play the giant monster and the city is the puzzle. Buildings are made of individual cells rather than being single objects, so a tower comes apart piece by piece as you work on it — and some of those cells are load-bearing. Smash a keystone and everything resting on it comes down at once, which is worth far more than grinding the same wall flat.

• Punches have a short reach and a brief cooldown, so position matters more than speed.
• Each building tracks its own condition and collapses in stages rather than all at once.
• Keystone cells are load-bearing: destroying one chain-collapses the cells above it.
• Every cell brought down that way does extra damage to the building, so a well-chosen hit is worth several ordinary ones.
• People in the windows restore your health, which is the only healing available.
• You are airborne while climbing, and a building that collapses underneath you takes you with it.

• Desktop: WASD or arrows to move and climb, F to punch, E to eat
• Phone & tablet: on-screen buttons supported on touch devices

• Solo with Easy, Normal and Hard difficulty
• Two-player co-op (local hot-seat or online)

• Look for the load-bearing cell before you start swinging. Grinding through a wall works, but toppling the column it supports is several times faster.
• Climb with an exit in mind. Collapses are chain reactions, and the structure you are standing on is part of the chain.
• Do not clear a building completely if your health is low — the people inside it are your only way to heal, and a flattened tower has none left.
• Work the middle of a tower rather than the top. Damage above a break is wasted when the break brings it down anyway.
• In two-player games the falling debris scores for whoever landed the last blow, which is why monsters end up hitting each other.

Demolish revives Rampage, released by Bally Midway in 1986, which inverted the usual arrangement by casting you as the monster. Three of them, each a person transformed into something enormous, scaling skyscrapers and punching them to rubble while the army shoots back.

The buildings are the real system. They collapse in stages as you work on them, and a tower you have weakened too far will drop out from under you mid-punch, which is as likely to end your turn as anything the soldiers manage. In two-player games the monsters can hit each other, and they usually do.

Demolish is an original free browser giant-monster game in the spirit of classic city-destruction arcade titles, with co-op for two players. No download required.

A free, original browser game on PlayPendium. No download, no install.