Winston obviously had something important go on in his past. He has space posters all over his messy apartment, letters from various governmental entities, and he spends lots of time building rockets on his own. Unfortunately, we live in the United States, and that means we need a job to support ourselves, so Winston, hearing a radio ad, does what anyone in the 1950s does and heads down to the We Deliver building with a smile and a firm handshake. Boomer dads of unemployed children are just beaming at the thought. A delivery driver, though, sounds pretty tame if you ask me.
Deliver At All Costs
Developer: Studio Far Out Games
Price: $30
Platforms: PC, PlayStation 5 (reviewed), Xbox Series X|S
MonsterVine was provided with a PlayStation code for review.
Deliver At All Costs is an arcade game at heart. The driving is fast and loose, the gadgets are wacky, the story is downright zany, the environment is destructible, and nobody can die. You could be flying in Winston’s truck and hit someone clear across the map, and they’ll get angry and chase after your car. Hilariously, if they don’t pull out a weapon, they’ll just launch themselves into the side of the truck. It’s madness. It’s also a lot of fun. Most of the missions either push the boundaries of how pandemonious the gameplay can get or rein you in real tight, so any misstep can result in mission failure.
Winston takes the job as a delivery person and, with an engineering spirit, manages to add a few gadgets to his truck to make it more effective for delivery. Wacky gadgets like a winch. That’s a bit disingenuous. Winston has a horn that can knock out all the windows in a city block, he can catapult things out of his flatbed, and he can even slow down time. These gadgets come in handy in their respective missions and not really anywhere else. In fact, in most missions, you’re locked into using the one gadget that’s necessary to complete the mission.
Which would be fine if, during a break, you were able to load things into your truck or winch them around. But you can’t. In free-play open-world mode, you can really only slow down time and use the mega-horn. Deliver At All Costs is a big, open world game and, in true sandbox style, kind of allows you to go hog wild. Cops exist in this game, but they appear more in story missions than they do just out in the open world. I drove through an entire boardwalk before knocking down a hotel, and not a single cop showed up. They will come with enough damage, but they are extremely lenient.
I still had a lot of fun with the open world, but it was disappointing to have all these gadgets and not really be able to do anything with them. The entire open world seems a little wasted; there aren’t really any puzzles or anything, just lots of boxes with cash in them and a few chests. The real fun is to be had during missions. To say the missions are wacky is actually an understatement. Harebrained deliveries brought to you by the most straight-faced 50s “how-do” personalities. Any normal person would walk away from this job, and maybe that’s why his boss is up his ass, but Winston sticks through it all.
At the beginning, the missions almost seem humdrum. One of the first deliveries given to Winston is that he needs to pick up a crate of watermelon. Park your truck, shove the crate of melons into the back, and the crate breaks apart, causing the melons to fill up the flatbed. No problem, Johnny Sweets is going to hop aboard and take you around town. The melons, you see, are old. They’ve lost a bit of their luster. But Johnny has a plan. Take your truck down to the farm to get them melons cleaned, then painted, and returned to the complaining customer. Delivered! Winston gets like $150, which is a lot in 1950s money.
The music is period accurate and jaunty, matching the action. I had some issues with some of the voice acting done by people other than the main cast. At one point, I had to spook some shareholders with some reckless driving. It resulted in me jumping my car into a shipping container and swinging it around. The most any of the shareholders could muster is, “Driver! At least stay in your lane!” It was a fun mission, but the repeated dialogue from the people I was driving around took some of the wind out of my sails.
The action is the juice in Deliver At All Costs. There’s a lot of driving around, destroying buildings, setting fires, popping tires, and a whole lot of explosions. Winston is a loyal guy, and his voice work is pretty great. Despite a mix between modern and PS2-era graphics, Deliver At All Costs looks pretty darn good. One mission fail screen in particular has flames all around Winston and a G-Man that looks downright dated. But for the most part, the UI matches the aesthetic, and the game looks great.
The performance leaves a bit to be desired though. I played Deliver At All Costs on a PS5-Pro and loading screens were a little long, after loading when given control there’d be a decent amount of stuttering, and in some areas the game really struggles. Far from unplayable, it was enough to be worth mentioning. Deliver At All Costs doesn’t run as smoothly as silk, but it does run. Most places play great and look great.
Deliver At All Costs has a lot of twists and turns that make it fun and engaging. There are some issues I have with the game, like the performance, the use of gadgets outside their specific missions, and how the game utilizes its open world. But despite those issues, I still had a great time playing Deliver At All Costs. Sometimes you play a game that just reminds you of the dumb fun you used to have playing games, and Deliver At All Costs was that for me.
The Final Word
Between the performance, gadget usage, and open world issues, Deliver At All Costs still manages to pull it out and make an incredibly satisfying game. Difficult in all the right places and fun the whole way through.
MonsterVine Rating: 4 out of 5 – Good
