Deliver at All Costs

When I tell you that Konami’s new game, Deliver at All Costs, is a combination of Crazy Taxi and Blast Corps, with a little Grand Theft Auto tossed in for good measure, I worry that you’re going to rush out and buy it immediately. After all, that does sound like the recipe for a killer action game. But for all this debut release from Studio Far Out Games gets right, it has an equal amount of problems dragging it down. We have a lot to talk about in this review of Deliver at All Costs.

Set in the late 1950s (and stretching into the early ‘60s), Deliver at All Costs follows a down-on-his-luck man named Winston Green, who picks up a simple courier job in order to make some fast and easy cash. But instead of being a stepping stone to a better job, Winston quickly finds himself embroiled in office politics, dealing with an aggressive competitor and being investigated by a nosey special agent, who will stop at nothing to reveal our hero’s mysterious past. In other words, delivering packages on time is the least of Winston’s worries.

But let’s not jump ahead too far, because at its core, Deliver at All Costs is a game about delivering items. Because this is a video game, the deliveries are purposely silly, challenging and almost always absurd. For example, an early mission will have you delivering balloons to the good people around St. Monique. Sounds easy, right? Unfortunate for us, the balloon making machine won’t stop blowing up balloons, which means that your delivery truck will sometimes catch air and just keep floating.

Another memorable mission will have you delivering a new city statue that was designed by a reclusive artist. This would be an easy job, if not for the birds swarming around the statue, looking to poop on it. In yet another mission, the job is to steal packages from the competition and deliver them, creating a combative race that resembles a demolition derby.

In case you haven’t figured it out, the game is all about giving you a fairly straight-forward delivery, and then throwing up a ludicrous obstacle that makes the whole thing far more difficult. It’s often something silly, like the miniature remote control cops that chase after the R.C. cars we’re delivering to the boys and girls of Shillington. Does that make any sense? Of course not, but it’s fun and silly.

And that’s what I like the most about Deliver at All Costs – it’s goofy. The game does a good job of hinting at just how far over-the-top the developers were willing to go, but there comes a point late in the game where the story goes so far off the rails that you have to admire the ambition. This is a game that could have played it straight, but what Studio Far Out Games has come up with is so much nuttier than you could guess. It’s the kind of lunacy that is guaranteed to stick with you, no matter what you think of the rest of the game.

And that goofiness isn’t isolated to the story and missions, because it’s also in the gameplay. For as much as this game is about making deliveries, at times it feels like it’s more about destroying the city around you. With every building, barrier and barn able to be destroyed, Deliver at All Costs reminds me a lot of Rare’s classic Nintendo 64 game, Blast Corps. It won’t take much to completely level somebody’s house, whether intentional or not. The game will even encourage this, especially when you’re dragging another car or a big metal bomb shelter behind our delivery truck. These missions are a lot of fun.

On paper, this game should work. I like the zany delivery missions, the destructible environments, the revisionist history, the colorful cast of characters, the conspiracy and even the baffling ending. For a game that gets so much right, it pains me to tell you that Deliver at All Costs is a huge disappointment. It’s the kind of game I wanted to love, but found the experience to be a lot more frustrating than fun.

Unfortunately, it’s not just one or two issues I can point to, but rather a series of annoying decisions that all work together in concert to ruin what should have been a really fun open-world delivery simulator. A lot of the blame belongs to the overhead isometric camera angle, which makes controlling the car a lot harder than it should be. There are a couple of different control options, but neither of them felt natural to me, and I found myself fighting the control right up until the credits rolled.

And it’s not just that the vehicles are a little hard to control, but it’s also the fact that the camera perspective makes it hard to judge narrow passages. I was constantly fall off of rickety old bridges or crashing into buildings because the camera makes it hard to judge where you’re going. And since you can only see a little way in front of you, speeding around the city is a lot more dangerous than it should be. This is a game that wants you to roar through the streets with reckless abandon, yet the camera perspective forces you to drive slower than your elderly grandmother.

Even in the best of circumstances, the 1950s-era delivery truck is unruly and not much fun to drive. It is constantly getting stuck on the environment and instead of just crashing into other vehicles on the road, the truck ends up climbing on top of the old timey cars. And you better not crash too many times or you’ll lose a wheel or two, forcing Winston to get out to do some manual repairs. That’s fine when you’re able to pull over and fix the truck, but it’s basically impossible when there are cops or other delivery companies after you. And wouldn’t you know it, those are the two times when your car is the most likely to break down, as both are crashing into our driver on purpose.

And then there’s open world, which is really just a series of extremely small areas that are split up by lengthy loading screens. It’s common to have to drive through three or four of these small maps just to pick up a delivery, which means sitting through three or four loading screens on the way there and then another three of four of these loading screens on the way back. All that adds up to several minutes of just waiting for the game to spool up a few blocks of real estate. Any sense of pacing or urgency gets thrown out the window as you wait for the next tiny section of the map to load in, and I’m actually surprised that modern consoles aren’t able to load in more of the open world.

All of this is a real shame, because the three fictional locations in Deliver at All Costs are all well-made and interesting to explore. Each section looks and feels different, and I really like how major events can reshape the map in both big and small ways. A good example of this is a volcano that local scientists are closely studying. At one point, early in the story, the volcano erupts, forcing you to completely rethink how you get around the island of St. Monique.

Even without natural disasters, there is still a lot to do and see in all three parts of the game. If you get out of the car and explore, you’ll run into a cast of colorful characters who desperately need your help. There are also vantage points to track down and all kinds of treasure chests and money boxes scattered around both the city streets and the rural farmland. For those who really get into the story and open world, there’s a surprising amount to find, build and upgrade in the game, adding an extra layer that you might not see if you simply rush through the campaign.

And all that is on top of a story that, once it gets going, flies off the rails so spectacularly that I can’t help but respect it. I can’t go as far as to recommend the game purely on the strength of its wacky narrative, especially given how frustrating it is to control, but it’s the one part of this game that truly kept me invested. Deliver at All Costs is the kind of experience that’s going to stick with me for a long time to come, even if it doesn’t fully come together as a game.