Deliver At All Costs Review

This was a game I randomly saw trailers for on the Playstation Youtube channel. It looked like a weirdly intriguing an quirky game. I originally thought it was going to be a title I drop after the first few hours if not minutes I ended up enjoying it a lot more than I thought I would.

The first thing that surprised me was how much effort was put into the story and presentation. I never was expecting there to as much voice acting and cinematics as there was but there is a good amount of them. The voice acting and cutscene direction are surprisingly solid too.

The story itself is also enjoyable in the moment even if by the end of the game the story never actually answers the plot questions that it raises or that extremely bizarre twist late game never really gets a clear cut explanation.

However, due to the cutscenes and voice acting carries much of the story. It's kind of like experiencing those stories where even though there can be issues, there's not an overwhelming amount of contrived writing that gets in the way of the moment to moment story beats.

What even is Deliver At All Costs? It's what the title implies. You handing out deliveries. At first what is seemingly a 2D inspired Grand Theft Auto game is more of a nice and tranquil delivery game. It's gives the game it's very calming atmosphere. The game does appear to be a low stakes in terms of gameplay, but it can also feel relaxing just driving around the city and handing out deliveries.

I'd play the game for hours without any interruptions due to how the story of a man just casually delivering packages while living a double life can feel so insync. It also helps that the environments are destructible and you don't have to go at the slow pace that you do in real life so the elements of a video game is still intact.

The game can get bashed for it's repetitive objectives but I'd argue it works in sync of trying to live a normal life with dramatic moments happening while you aren't viewing them.

It also helps that the game mostly checkpoints really well and there is never an overwhelming content you have to do upon death.

There are some major issues with the game particularly with the controls. Sure, you can level the criticism that when driving, you can't see what's in front of you. My big issue is turn the truck or particularly: tight turns. Rotating the stick in relative to auto adjusting camera can make it hard to tell what is the is appropriate direction to turn in that moment. When making a tight turn to the left, is it actually to the right? Hard to tell especially when moving at fast speed.

Due to this if it weren't for the forgiving checkpoint system, this aspect of the controls would be hard to look over but due to that, I can forgive this as frustrating as fast turns in this game can be.

There is the aforementioned not being able to see in front of you but the arrows that you get when driving to the objectives is accomadating enough if a little too intrusive.

The game can also be a little too long. When the plot twist happens and towards the final few chapters of the game, it to hurry and wrap up due to how insane and dramatic the whole thing was. The final mission of driving a truck inside of a building was entertaining but the game was already quite lengthy before all that. You can only make driving a delivery truck engaging for so long, it doesn't really help that the aforementioned plot twist is never properly explained.

Overall, Deliver At All Costs was a surprise. For a game I was almost convinced I was going to drop, I ended up liking a lot more than I was going to.