Now Playing: Deliver At All Costs

In Deliver At All Costs you play as Winston, a young man who takes a job at the ‘We Deliver’ courier service, tasked with making various deliveries throughout a 1950s-esque American world, one in which nearly everything can be driven through, into, over and destroyed.

I was expecting an isometric Crazy Taxi style experience, with timed missions in which your goal is to – as the title suggests – deliver at all costs by ignoring the roads and ploughing through anything that gets in your way. But sadly, that’s not what I got.

The first thing that surprised me about Deliver At All Costs was how many cut-scenes there were and how prominent the story was in the experience. I didn’t see this is a bad surprise – at least initially – because I was curious to see how the story would play out.

But within the first few hours of play, I found myself growing rather sick of it, feeling that I was spending as much – if not more – of my time watching (rather dull) cut-scenes than actually playing the game. To make matters worse, the game forces you to tediously drive to and from work between every mission or two.

It’s a repetitive and frankly unnecessary journey that feels like it exists purely to pad out what is already a fairly meagre quantity of content. I was spending more time driving to work and back again between missions than I was actually playing the missions themselves.

And the missions suck for the most part. It’s not like there’s no fun to be found here, but every time I did start what felt like a fun mission, the game ruined it by needlessly dragging the mission out by forcing me to do the same, repetitive task several times in a row.

The mission I probably enjoyed the most involved towing a ‘bomb shelter’ (shaped more like a wrecking ball) to a property and watching as it flung itself through buildings and smashed over cars like something out of the ending of Fast 5. But even that mission is marred by the game continually redirecting you to yet another location to the point of tedium.

 

And then you get a lot of missions that really aren’t fun at all – like one where you’ve got to tediously ‘catch’ boxes that fall from the sky and the game wants you to do it several times in several different locations.

Or there’s the mission I hated the most that sees you transporting a bomb on the back of your truck and even the slightest of knocks causes it to explode. In a game with rather wonky driving, the mission was tedious as f**k to get through because even a tiny knock kills you and forces you to watch the same ‘comedic’ cut-scene before re-spawning (thankfully) somewhat nearby.

I’ve used the word ‘tedious’ or a variation of it a lot already in this review because that’s how I can best sum up my experience of playing Deliver At All Costs. I feel like there’s a really fun, simple and more arcade-like experience buried here beneath layers of boring story, pointless back and forth travel and dull as dishes mission design.

You also realise quite early on that the ‘destruction’ aspect really is just a gimmick that’s more detrimental to your experience than transformative. Sure, you can plough through a building on your way from A to B but chances are, it will only slow you down if not stop you entirely when you get stuck on some piece of fallen scenery.

There’s also a lot of environmental pieces that can’t be destroyed, and it’s quite easy to get your car totally stuck forcing you to go into a menu to re-spawn nearby. So in the end, you learn that sticking to the roads and avoiding driving through, into or over anything leads to a smoother, less irritating and more enjoyable experience – which kind of defeats the entire point of the game.

After about 2 hours playing Deliver At All Costs I thought I might just give up because I really wasn’t enjoying it, but I decided to persist and see if the game improved. Spoiler: it didn’t. I started skipping most of the cut-scenes but I saw enough to know the direction the story takes is absolute nonsense.

The game is split into 3 acts, the first of which is the longest, and then the next two are both pretty short. The last is only 3 missions. I finished the game with about 5 hours clocked, but if I hadn’t been skipping so many of those boring cut-scenes it might have been 10.

Overall, Deliver At All Costs isn’t a game I can recommend. I got it for free on Epic and honestly, even if you got it for free too, I’d say don’t waste your time with it. It’s a game that doesn’t seem to know what it wants to be. I kind of hated most of my time playing it aside from those very, very occasional moments in a mission when I suddenly realised I was having fun. But those moments are fleeting and don’t last very long.

4/10