When I first heard about Deliver At All Costs, it was through Steam Next Fest buzz from earlier in the year. I didn’t see much of it, I didn’t even check out the demo at the time, because I was busy going through a bunch of other Steam Next Fest games. But I kept seeing it pop up on the lists I would read of Next Fest demos to check out. It looked interesting, and like it would be a fun and funny game to play for a few hours.

That cursory knowledge of it made me jump at the chance to review it, and now that I’ve played it all the way through, I’m glad that I knew next to nothing about it before going in. If I were more aware of what to expect, I feel like I wouldn’t have enjoyed the best parts of Deliver At All Costs as much as I did.

But those good parts don’t last, and by the time credits rolled, I was left hoping Deliver At All Costs hadn’t tried to do as much as it did, and instead stayed closer to the ground as just a wacky delivery game.

Deliver At All Costs starts as a small story about Winston Green, a young engineering prodigy that fell into some mysterious trouble that’s landed him in an island town, living in a motel where he’s about to be evicted, struggling to find work like everyone else on the island of St. Monique after a project connecting the island to the big city has crumbled the local economy.

A radio ad has you rushing to a local delivery company for a job, and it’s here where you first experience the…annoying, to say the least, driving controls. On the one hand, I get it. The driving is supposed to be annoying to some degree, and that’s part of the comedy that comes from the kind of oddball deliveries you make in the first two acts of the game.

The obstructed isometric view, what often felt like far too many townsfolk walking around and cars on the road, the hundreds of objects and environmental hazards, are all meant to up the ante when you’re trying to deliver a bomb without it exploding on your way to its intended home.

I get what developer Far Out Games is trying to do. But the grace period my understanding offered ended well before Deliver At All Costs did. I spent most of my nine hours completing the story frustrated at best and laughing through mild annoyance at worst when it came to the core of the gameplay.

Those ‘best’ parts came early in my nine hours, when I was going from delivery to delivery, watching the stakes get raised in new and comical ways. I was also increasingly intrigued by how the story was evolving. Even at best, it was never as cinematic and dramatic as it was clearly trying to be, but the voice acting and writing had their moments that made me want to find out what happened next.

I also appreciated the characters around Winston at the start, like Norman, Johnny and Harald. Even Donovan and Bertha, as antagonists, had potential in my eyes when I early on in my journey with Deliver At All Costs. Too bad nothing ever came of that potential. I’ll hold off on story details for the sake of not spoiling the experience of anyone who still wants to play the game through to credits, but the bottom line is that the story goes nowhere.

It’s a whole lot of setup and no follow-through, with an ending that feels so disconnected from what the game begins as. Frankly, I would call the whole thing confusing, but I skipped past that and went all the way to relief that the game was over and I that once this review goes live, I wouldn’t have to think about Deliver At All Costs again.

The story doesn’t just stumble because it’s undercooked, though. It was often impossible to take any of the scenes seriously because the way characters move and talk in cutscenes looked awful, and again, disconnected. The camera would be close up in a characters face, almost as if to make sure you watched how the characters mouth moved in entirely the wrong way for the words they were saying and that nothing looked synched up.

When it happens once or twice, it feels like a bug. When it happens in almost every scene, it starts to feel like something the team either didn’t notice, or more likely they did, and had no time to fix it so it was left unfinished. Which is the sum feeling I got when I hit credits. That so much about Deliver At All Costs was unfinished.

That unfinished feeling also didn’t go away with the other half of how the story is told, through Winston’s journal entries for each chapter. Jumping into the menu, you can read about events that aren’t depicted in the game, but in some cases are unfortunately far more interesting than the events that did end up being depicted through cutscenes or gameplay.

As if these were the moments left on the cutting room floor that Far Out Games still wanted to include, since they were narratively important, but didn’t fit in the production timeline the studio had. Again, it felt like I was playing a trimmed down, unfinished and bad version of a fuller, better game.

Save for one area of the game, and that’s the setting. Exploring St. Monique, Shellington and New Reed felt like getting to play in three massive diorama’s of different kinds of towns and cities. Like everyone you’d pass on the road was a little plastic or wooden toy that had come to life, and you’re driving around and smashing up each area like a kid would, if they were given free-reign in the massive miniature city their parent had meticulously crafted.

Each location is extremely detailed, and while I didn’t love having the screen go to black with a title card for every time you exit and enter different parts of the map or the interior of the few buildings you can enter, what got me through that was knowing I’d be met with a bright, detailed, and charming area to wreak havoc in.

The setting and visual style is so good, in fact, that I could have forgiven the story’s shortcomings a lot more if the gameplay was worth sticking around for. Unfortunately, it never meaningfully evolves, in both the main and side missions, the latter of which are almost frustratingly inconsequential, as some of them have you track down other cars that you can do basically nothing with.

It’s also a pretty huge miss that, in a game where you’re encouraged to drive through buildings, you can’t freely use whatever gadgets you can stick to your company truck to cause even more damage when driving through buildings or terrorizing the town.

Ultimately, I’m disappointed to have to say that I wouldn’t recommend Deliver At All Costs. It’s a game that tries to do way too much, and because it fails at so much of what it tries, it sours the experience of the things it was doing really well when you first start playing.

PS5 version tested. Review code provided by the publisher.

5.5

WCCFTECH RATING

Deliver At All Costs