They say that if you ignore your detractors, you also have to ignore the praise. But I’m proud that my boss told me I’m a good courier. “I am a good courier”, I think, ramming a remote control corvette destined for a local child’s chimney into a pedestrian’s shins, knocking them skyward, zipping away before the sound of soft bones on hard concrete catches up with me. “The best courier,” I nod, reversing my truck into a beach-front bar on the way to fumigate a truckful of rotting melons. “The best damn courier in town!”, I exclaim, honking my newly-installed cursehorn, shattering nearby windows and streetlights into glinting injury confetti.
Sometimes, confidence is more valuable than a measured perspective on things, and if you need to focus on the praise to block out the little voice telling you the way you’re driving to these sun-kissed surf guitars is less Dennis Wilson, more Charlie Manson, so be it. Deliver At All Costs has me thinking a lot about confidence, in fact. It invokes GTA with a linked series of open maps, constantly devil-whispering your attention away from main and side missions with the promise of the hallowed fuckaboutsesh – smashable suburbia detailed down to the individual fence picket taking the place of rocket launchers and car pile-ups. But tragically, it’s also cursed with a lack of confidence that this is enough. It wants to be something more.
With games, I’ve come to view silliness – joyful, knowing, celebratory, confident silliness – as a kind of fearlessness. There was a much-mocked Tweet by an apparently well-known industry human a few years back along the lines of “in a world where every game is John Wick, The Last Of Us 2 is Schindler’s list”. Allusion aside, I remember thinking that my problem was that not enough games are John Wick. We should be so lucky to have more games exhibit that level of technical virtuosity and playfulness and inventiveness and character while also displaying such prescient levels of self-awareness and comfort regarding their own limits. Excellent, dumb fun with nothing to prove is in shorter supply than you might think.
To wit: Deliver At All Costs is about 70% videogame-ass videogame, and a pretty great one at that. The rest is dull cutscenes and conversations and other assorted faff, starring a deeply unlikable protagonist, standoffish enough to be instantly repellant while also being the sort of bozo who says shit like “well, here goes nothing!” out loud to himself before walking into a job interview. It’s been ages since I’ve played a freeform chaos ’em up (Destroy All Humans! springs to mind, in spirit if not specifics), and the result was like going for lunch with a friend I hadn’t seen for years, only for them to grab the delicious milkshake out of my hands every ten minutes and refuse to give it back until I’d listened to the next part of their screenplay. It’s not a good screenplay, Eric. And give me back my milkshake.
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I wouldn’t even say that the game’s writing is bad, in the sense that it does contain very good things resulting from humans putting imaginative ideas on paper. The formula stays consistent. Either get a thing and take it to a place, sometimes with a few stops across the way, without it getting ruined. Or, collect or deliver lots of things quickly, sometimes with a time limit, sometimes while being attacked by cops or other vermin. You’ll get a few cargo-loading tools to upgrade your truck as your progress – a winch, a crane. But the game is so creative with its twists and framing that each delivery stands out.
One mission, you’re delivering a stone statue of the mayor to replace an old one that’s been painted white over the years by a truly biblical quantity of bird plop. As you’re making your way back down treacherous volcano slopes, you’re set upon by a swarming armada of dysentery pigeons, forced to swerve incoming shit sheets to deliver your cargo as pristine as possible. Another, you’re delivering a gigantic marlin, driving through barrels of feed en route so it doesn’t get hangry and attempt to flip over your car with its tail. Next, you might be ramming into rival courier trucks and crane-stealing their packages to make the deliveries yourself.
This is all made goofier by what Brendy described as “slip-slidey Micro Machines goodness”. While I’d imagine trying to drive such a pressure-sensitive vehicle with a mouse and keyboard is a nightmare, on controller your truck is tight and responsive while also reacting to the slightest bit of overzealousness on your part with clownish histrionics. This is fine and good and welcome. The worse you drive, the more fun it is, and after playing two parryful games in a row that ceaselessly screamed at me like J. K. Simmons in Whiplash to get it right, it feels great to play something this joyously permissiveness of sloppy, slippy smashbastardry.
So, what’d be the perfect chaser to all this creative mayhem? Why, some sort of traumatic backstory for your courier, naturally. Comic strips where an overbearing father unsupportive of your engineer-tagonist’s love for “those damn gizmos” wants him to go shoot a fox instead. But he can’t do it! He can’t pull the trigger! I ran over twelve people yesterday, game. I made at least twice that many people homeless. There’s a rivalry with upper management trying to uncover your courier’s not-actually-that-dark past. You have to go to bed and wake up and get dressed every few missions in your apartment, despite there being no other life sim elements that would give this stuff purpose. There’s a sequence at the end of the first act where you have to push crates and filing cabinets from doorways to escape a burning building. It’s unconvincing, uninteresting, unfocused, and there’s far too much of it.
Thing is though, the city is already a nice enough place to spend time, vibes-wise; a toytown pastiche of mid-century Americana that creates a familiar and vibrant enough sense of place for you to enjoy levelling that place to bits. There’s enough here to convey the game’s identity without all the faff. And this is where I return to thinking about confidence. More specifically, how Deliver At All Costs has a lack of trust in itself. The game seems afraid to let itself be defined by its strongest elements, and attempts a type of storytelling structure that serves it not at all.
Because this doesn’t strike me as a story someone especially wanted to tell, nor the additional sequences ones anyone especially wanted to make. They are inclusions born of a nervous yearning to fulfill the mold of an impersonal idea of what constitutes a real videogame, a ladder to worthiness built from checkboxes. Worse, they drag the party down and refuse to give me back my damn milkshake. If you reckon you’ve got a higher tolerance for battering the ‘skip dialogue’ button though, by all means go for it. There is, as I say, some excellent, dumb fun to be had here.
