Some things I have smashed through in the demo for Deliver At All Costs: fire hydrants, surf boards, barns, an entire laundromat, street lamps, palm trees, garbage cans, several pedestrians, mailboxes, food stalls, fish markets, brick walls, a lookout tower, dumpsters, housewives, the city fountain, and a row of unsuspecting sunbathers. This toy-like messabout is proof of one thing. Almost every problem can be solved by driving a 1950s truck straight through it.
Deliver At All Costs was announced in September last year, a delivery game that’s part Crazy Taxi, part Grand Theft Auto. You play as underemployed courier boy Winston, who is running odd jobs for a delivery company with some eccentric management. The trailer showed enough wanton environmental destruction that the heinous sandcastle kicker inside me was intrigued. Now it has a demo out for Steam Next Fest, and I can confirm: it feels good to smash.
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That’s in large part thanks to the driving. An isometric-ish perspective can work a certain magic on a driving game, I’ve often found. It makes vehicles feel toy-like, as if you’re a nipper racing your Hot Wheels around from on-high. That’s the case here. It helps that the car movement itself is smooth and satisfying. You drift in gratifying curves, your speed is never so fast you can’t keep an eye on what’s coming, and a certain amount of helpful braking is automatically applied just in the act of turning.
There’s a little bit of story leading you through your time on the island of St Monique – a fictional tropical territory of the United States in the 1950s. The first mission will see you delivering a case of exploding fireworks across the island, dodging the explosions that threaten to pop your wheels if you hit a runaway firecracker. But it’s fine. You can get out and repair your wheels with tools easily enough.
That and the forgiving respawn gives me the feeling this tire smoker is more interested in the gags it can create through reckless deliverymanship than in actually throwing big challenges your way. But the next mission is at least a little trickier. You’ve got to drive 60 stinking watermelons to an insecticide plant without too many flying overboard when you rush over potholes or take a corner too fast.
I spent a big chunk of the demo ignoring the story mode entirely, choosing instead to drive around and explore the five zones of the island already open in the demo. I smashed through greenhouses along the tropical coast of one region and blazed through the trainyards, factories, and sheds of another more industrial district. There are also side missions you can pick up by chatting to civilians (the mayor wants me to find his body double because he can’t be arsed going to budget meetings himself).
As for how GTA-like it gets, well, it doesn’t have the same hunger for raw violence. You can run over pedestrians but they bounce harmlessly around as immortal ragdolls. Although, they will get furious and chase you down with baseball bats, and will shove you onto the ground if you step outside the car to face them. You can’t hijack any car driving around the streets, but any parked car is fair game. I could’ve also hopped into a phone booth and used it to recall the company truck, but by this stage it was more chaotic just to source my next fencewrecker from the streets.
I very much admire when a game smashes the right “gamefeel” for its theme, and going by the demo Deliver At All Costs has some of that slip-slidey Micro Machines goodness. The full game doesn’t have a release date yet. But we’ll let you know when it’s out for delivery.
