alt Hacker NewsI mean, technically, Blast Corps had a story (you needed to pave the way for a runaway nuclear missle to not crash and explode or something), but then you'd get medals for thoroughly destroying everything anyway, because really it was about knocking down buildings and the "story" was a silly pretense. And it was great.
Rampage and its sequels were pretty much also just "destroy buildings, the game," and also great.
My kids enjoy building with tiles and then knocking it down.
If you've ever shot a gun or detonated some explosives in real life, you'll know that's fun too despite these things being used to hurt people also.
Red Faction: Guerilla had physics based modeling of damage to structures and an auxiliary game mode where the objective was to collapse as many buildings as possible within a time limit using demolition charges and other weapons. (Of course, the player is a noble revolutionary fighting an oppressive government so there's a fig-leaf of social acceptability.) Precise and quick placement of demolition charges on structural supports was key to getting a good score. If they'd had some sort of procedural map generation for it, I'd probably still be playing it today.