As far as package-shipping simulators go, Deliver At All Costs more closely resembles drunk driving than it does Death Stranding. There’s no need for complicated weight management or careful navigation through its 1950s small-town USA setting; instead, this kooky courier quest loads your pickup truck with increasingly quirky cargo and sends you careening through road signs, fences, shopfronts, and countless pedestrians, with almost every dispatched delivery quickly devolving into a full-on destruction derby. It’s a riotously good time for a while, but it soon starts to sputter out and eventually breaks down well before it reaches the end of its 10-hour journey when its nonsensical sci-fi story fails to pay off and this world turns out to be far more rewarding to reduce to rubble than it is to actually explore.
There is a plot connecting all of its street-shredding shipments, but honestly the less said about it, the better. You’re Winston Green, a likeable fresh hire at the We Deliver corporation who’s seemingly on the run after a mysterious incident in his past. Though it begins as a sort of goofy workplace comedy it soon makes jarring tonal shifts into corporate crime conspiracies and eventually a preposterous tale of time travel, before crashlanding into a fast-tracked climax that left me feeling about as hollow as someone who’s tried to make a meal out of packing peanuts. Deliver At All Costs’ story is a bit like a box of flatpacked furniture delivered from IKEA; it’s full of interesting parts to pore over, but once you’ve put it all together it seems noticeably wonkier than you expected and it’s clear that there’s more than a couple of screws loose.
The real star is the staggering destructibility of its world, which is viewed from your choice of two top-down angles. Pretty much everything above ground can be satisfyingly smashed asunder as you tear around in your delivery truck turning every apartment block into a potential Jenga tower. There’s admittedly an overly fragile and weightless feel to it all – it’s a bit like crashing through houses made of cards rather than bricks and mortar because you rarely feel the impact or lose momentum – but punching my own shortcuts through everything from hotel lobbies to tennis courts and tombstone-covered graveyards kept me consistently amused for at least the first half of the drive. I gleefully sped around chewing through scenery like I was Nicholas Cage in Face/Off. Pretty much the only time I pumped the brakes was when I had to keep something from spilling out of my truckbed, or whenever I hit one of the abrupt loading screens that separates each district of the three cities that make up its decently sized open-world map.
Can’t Hardly Freight
Deliver At All Costs’ 20-mission-long chain of violent cargo hauls aren’t so much door-to-door as they are wall-through-wall, but that’s not to say I didn’t face some resistance along the way. Different challenges are introduced in keeping with the object that’s dumped into the back of your truck or dragged behind you with a winch, and a few entertainingly wacky work orders had me laughing out loud. In one mission reminiscent of Pixar’s Up, I was hired to transport a bouquet of helium balloons, which meant that even the smallest bump in the road launched me into a clumsy aerial drift that left me struggling to stay on terra firma like a mailman on the moon’s surface. In another, I had to steer around a leaking tank of napalm that was igniting a growing wall of fire behind me, turning a simple pick-up and drop-off into a citywide game of Snake that blew me to smithereens if I attempted to double back on my delivery route.Then there was the time I had to drag a new statue of the local mayor towards the town square without it getting bombed by the swooping seagulls dropping their own special deliveries.
Unfortunately, though, there are almost as many duds in the mix as there are standouts. Being asked to drive recklessly to scare a limousine full of crooked executives doesn’t really come as a break from the norm when you’ve been otherwise hurtling around like a madman during each and every other job, for example. A mission to photograph a series of cows being abducted by a UFO can be passed simply by mindlessly spamming the camera button. Meanwhile, the on-foot retrieval of your stolen truck from under the nose of a patrolling security van becomes less of a daring infiltration into a scrapyard and more of a walk in the park because Deliver At All Costs’ stealth system is non-existent, to the point where you can just stroll in there unopposed with minimal thought or effort. That’s not to say the rest of the on-foot action is much better – pretty much whenever you’re forced to leave your car for more than a moment it becomes a dull stretch of basic platforming where your only actions are walk, jump, climb, and shove.
Haul or Nothing
Elsewhere in Deliver At All Costs there’s rarely any substantial consequences for your actions, and that makes it start to get dull sooner than it seems like it should. If you accidentally flip your car over it will automatically right itself. If you bust a tyre you can hop out and instantly repair it with the tap of a button. If you bring down an entire building because you’re doing doughnuts through all four corners of its foundations you will almost certainly draw the attention of the police (who, the intro movie explains, are all but non-existent in this island town), but you can instantly lose that heat by leaving your truck and diving into a dumpster – even without necessarily breaking the line of sight. In fact, even if you’re caught, you just instantly respawn with no punishment served anyway. On the one hand, the general lack of rules or repercussions gave me the freedom to drive as recklessly as I wanted to, but it also meant that almost everything felt noticeably low in stakes.
Sometimes, in fact, Deliver At All Costs is so forgiving that it completely sucks any tension out of the task at hand. Steering your delivery truck from one side of the city to the other with an armed atom bomb couched in its cargo bed shouldn’t just have you flirting with danger, but buying danger a drink, beckoning danger onto the dance floor, and giving danger an open-mouthed kiss. But in practice, it’s surprisingly lacking in intensity: there’s no ticking clock to pressure you into keeping your foot clamped down on the accelerator, allowing you to take things as slow and steady as you like. That means the only challenge here is to not drive like a maniac. Even when I did accidentally bump into a car and blow myself to bits, generous checkpoints meant that I was back on the road with my unstable payload with minimum penalty to my progress. I don’t want a game to be overly punishing, but there’s a happy medium to be struck that this one never manages to nail.
Elsewhere, and despite the consistently impressive amount of environmental detail to be found throughout its toy town world from Christmas tree-lined main streets to a giant drive-in theater projecting black and white films, there’s not a great deal of interesting activities to amuse yourself with when you’re off the clock. There are a further 10 side missions to be found dotted around the map, but few of them are particularly memorable. There’s a basic circuit race to place first in and a couple of missing persons to track down, but there’s little here to match the more creative courier tasks found in the main story path. Well, there’s one enjoyable exception that had me piloting a satanic sports car straight out of Stephen King’s Christine. Deliver At All Costs could’ve used a lot more like her to make its map call me back for more.
There are other unique vehicles to track down too, but these are uniformly disappointing on a number of counts. For one, their locations are clearly marked on the map from the outset, so you’re not provided with the same thrill of discovery of, say, a Forza Horizon barn find. You also don’t have a garage to store them in, and nor can you use them for a delivery mission, so they’re mainly there for a brief joyride before being ditched in favour of a return to your trusty We Deliver truck. Worse still, they don’t provide any real point of difference to make them even remotely worth the minimal effort to uncover – they each handle more or less the same, and there are no unique emergency missions to undertake in the ambulance or dessert drops in the ice cream van to trigger like you might find in a Grand Theft Auto game. They’re just sort of… there.
Another underwhelming factor is the upgrades you can weld onto your truck using spare parts found throughout the world (as ridiculous as it may be to open a giant chest to find someone has stashed a single roll of duct tape in it). They seem like they should open up new possibilities for mayhem and creativity in a world that’s as eager to be knocked down as this, but these, too, are disappointingly limited in their use. The crane is handy for the job that sees you load a giant marlin onto your truck and then literally fishtail your way to a drop-off point, but both it and the winch you get access to afterwards can’t actually be used outside of a mission to mess with objects at will. You can’t, say, attach the winch’s tow cable to a random car or pedestrian and drag them around town just for kicks like you can in Saints Row or Just Cause. You can supercharge your car horn to blast the windows out of shopfronts, but you can’t use the cargo bed catapult at all outside of a handful of specific story moments. There’s a lot of potential for Deliver At All Costs to achieve the same sort of freeform fun that we see in games like Goat Simulator, but it just doesn’t give you enough flexibility to really revel in it after you’ve grown tired of blasting into people’s living rooms like a Kool-Aid Man on wheels.
