Deliver At All Costs Review

The year is 1959, you’re reminded literally every time you load up Deliver At All Costs, a delivery “simulator” with destructible environments and a wacky sensibility. Seriously, after the logos, it plays the same short prologue video reminding you of the setting, it’s weird. But hey, weird is this game’s bread and butter!

You’re put into the shoes of a man who’s escaping his past and is behind on the rent. So, you get a job with a company called We Deliver, which services the island of St Monique. As the story progresses, your adventures will see you spreading to two cities on the mainland, so be prepared to either learn the streets or read the map! Or, you could take the direct route through buildings.

Yes, the majority of structures, walls, fences, and billboards will fall apart if you blast your pickup truck through them fast and often enough. Honestly, that was the major appeal to me when I first heard about Deliver At All Costs; I enjoy a game where I can break everything! However, as each region of every city is separated by a loading screen, once you return to an area, the destruction has been repaired. Sure, it makes sense in case you need to deliver something there later, but it was still a bit of a surprise. But don’t worry that the police will chase after you just for taking down a bridge, a hotel, two cafes, and a house, no it’s actually quite difficult to get them after you in the normal course of a mission. I started driving like a wrecking ball, and it still took a shocking amount of devastation before the Five-O got involved.

I don’t want to get too far into this review before talking about the lack of accessibility features. My PlayStation 5 and TV are on the opposite side of the room from where I sit, as with most console players, and the fact that you can’t resize the text is a real frustration. I have great eyesight, but even so it’s like reading the third line up on an eye chart when the sixth line would be much more comfortable. Also, not every cutscene has subtitles.

The accessibility options it does have are Dialogue Slow Motion, so that you can read the subtitles when important dialogue is happening, a Camera Shake toggle, volume sliders, and remappable controls. From what I could tell, you can remap everything, which is a huge plus in the game’s favour — if only it had adjustable subtitles. Not that the subtitles are always a winner, as I spotted at least one homophone; payed instead of paid.

The gameplay loop is “go to We Deliver, get a job, deliver or drive to a pick up point and then deliver”, though there is significant variation on the theme. Oh, and madcap things are a constant. Your first job sees you picking up some fireworks to get to the beach, but surely you have to be careful to avoid damage because otherwise the fireworks will set off, right? No, they set off the instant you get in the truck, and you have to dodge them as they rain down on everyone around you as you go! It really sets the tone for the rest of the game.

But what about time limits, I hear you ask? The vast majority of missions don’t have a time limit, though there’s one in the late game that, while it isn’t timed in the traditional sense, you will explode if you dilly-dally. I felt that the checkpoints were fair more often than not, so failure rarely required a lot of replaying. Also, you can replay missions at any time by selecting them from your journal (the pause menu).

Speaking of the journal, most of the story in Deliver At All Costs is explained better in the pause menu than in the cutscenes, so if you have questions then you need to read the detailed explanations. Especially when there is one of the several time skips. Doubly so when things start to go a little crazy.

Music is a highlight of the game, so long as you like it 50s-style. There are only a few licensed songs, with most of the music being unique to each region of the cities. This does mean that it can get repetitive if you’re not a fan of a particular track, but the loops are broken up by radio commercials. However, there are only a handful of those… The most frustrating part of the music is, when you’re loading into another area, it always glitches. Perhaps it’s only on the PlayStation version, but it’s so noticeable every time, and some missions require you to drive through three or four loading screens!

The voice acting is hit-and-miss, with some odd line reads, or just poor direction, resulting in stilted delivery that just feels off. The main characters are great for the most part, but the secondary characters could have done with another pass.

Graphics in Deliver At All Costs are decent but sometimes let down by weird camera angles in cutscenes. A long focus on a pen during a tense conversation which doesn’t involve said object, for instance. It’s not in every scene, some are quite well directed, which makes the odd choices really stick out.

I enjoyed each one of the roughly 10 hours that I spent with this game, despite its stated issues. It’s fun to just drive around and find some collectables (I got about 30% of them), maybe kick someone off of the top of a bridge (you can’t kill anyone and there’s no fall damage), blast full speed literally through a petrol station… That sort of thing. But there are also a lot of memorable missions which I’d like to retry, if only to see the unique failure cutscenes that I didn’t see the first time through.

Deliver At All Costs is available this week on PC, Xbox Series X|S and PlayStation 5.