Hackery, Math & Design
The game is unique for having a voxel-driven engine, which provides a fully destructible environment. It embraces this boon, by giving the player a multitude of tools that gleefully alter and obliterate the setting, to create shortcuts between spaces. This enables a kind of gameplay rarely seen: where the environment is not just a passive backdrop, but a fully interactive part of the experience.
This is highly notable. In today's landscape of Unity/Unreal-powered gaming titles, it illustrates a very old maxim: that novel gameplay is primarily the result of having a dedicated game engine to enable that play. In doing so, it manages to evoke a feeling that is both incredibly retro and yet unquestionably futuristic. But it's more than that: it shows that the path graphics development has been walking, in search of ever more realistic graphics, can be bent and subverted entirely. It creates something wholly unique and delightful, without seeking true photorealism.
It utilizes raytracing, to present global illumination, with real-time reflections, and physically convincing smoke and fire. It not only has ordinary vehicles, like cars and vans, but also industrial machinery like bulldozers and cranes, as well as an assortment of weapons and explosives, to bring the entire experience together. Nevertheless, it does not require the latest GPU hardware: it is an "ordinary" OpenGL application. So how does it do it?
