Deliver At All Costs

Deliver At All Costs was provided by Konami for review. Thank you!

There are so many games that I see every day, and I love discovering new ones, but Deliver At All Costs blew me away when I first saw it. It wasn’t the story or gameplay loop that hooked me at first, it was the physics based destruction. It looked like everything in the town could be destroyed with debris flying everywhere constantly, and I was immediately interested. Despite some misses with its story and overall gameplay structure, I ultimately enjoyed my experience and would recommend it to other fans of games with total destruction.

The game primarily has you completing missions, delivering packages from point A to point B, usually with some weird stipulation that makes driving more difficult. This can range from a firework machine shooting exploding fireworks at the road, a giant flopping fish, or a Seismograph that alerts to incoming landslides and rocks that stop the car in its tracks. It was almost always goofy and ridiculous missions and it kept things interesting while driving through the town.

The missions you take do feel varied and have a good chunk of creativity to them, but some just aggravated me. There’s one where you have to sabotage another shipping company and steal a package from them and deliver it yourself. Trying to manage the crane to steal the package while being bombarded by speeding cars made keeping the package on my truck and progressing near impossible. Every time I moved an inch, a car would slam into me and my package would fly off, and I had to reposition myself to get the package back and hope another car didn’t ram into me and make me do it all over again. And don't get me started on the mission delivering that atomic bomb.

This did also bring up some issues I have with the controls. The team did the best they can, but there are just some moments where I accidentally accelerated instead of backed up or turned the wrong way. There are two ways to control your car, and I think the recommended one (dual directions) is as much better, but it wasn’t enough to stop these moments from happening. This was exacerbated by the two camera angles, which depending on where you are, could completely obstruct view of the car or put it at a weird angle that makes it weirder to control.

There are some pieces of side content like new cars to find, optional quests to complete, locations to check out from afar, and parts to acquire to upgrade your car, but I didn’t find much motivation to actually take part in them. It just didn’t feel like they affected much in the grand scheme and the upgrades, while interesting, weren’t as gameplay changing as I hoped.

However, the near constant chaos and physics-based destruction was just so satisfying to witness. Nearly every building, structure, and person could be destroyed to some degree, and included giant bridges falling, buildings tumbling down, and structural debris flying everywhere. I don’t know many games where I can completely drive through a house’s ground floor and come out the other side, but I can here, and I was in love. Sometimes just driving around the city and watching bodies fly and buildings tumble was the best part of my playthrough.

It’s hard to explain just how much fun causing destruction was. There were times during my playthrough that I would only drive through buildings and not do any missions or other side content. I just wanted to see buildings get destroyed in satisfying ways, and I got what I wanted. That experience alone made the game worthwhile for me to play, even though it hardly makes for a complete gaming experience. I’m a sucker for physics, and that’s Deliver At All Costs’ bread and butter.

Most of the locations you can drive in are enjoyable, but there are some that I wasn’t a fan of. I mainly disliked any mission that took me to the volcano, which included very narrow, winding roads and lots of lava. With the way the game plays, I would consistently fall off and blow my car up, causing me to start over. It didn’t bring me back far and I was able to keep slowly progressing, but it was almost always a constant nuisance.

However, just when I was starting to get a little tired of the main map that we start out on, we get to a completely new one with new locations, and I found this to be extremely smart. It makes the game feel more unique and with more to do. And with how beautiful the visuals are, mixed with the satisfying destruction, I had such a good time exploring and plowing my way through.

The story is actually more interesting than I expected, though there are moments of rigidity. You play as Winston Green, a man with a very intriguing past, who takes a job as a courier for the company "We Deliver." He is finally able to catch a break, only to learn that the boss' son, Donovan, is looking into his past and tries to figure out who he really is. This starts a crazy chain of events, uncovering what Winston is really hiding.

Apart from some weird moments that didn't make a lot of sense and felt forced, but I was very interested in Winston's past and the world. His connection as an engineer is intriguing and I was so curious what he did to bring him to a new town that was so secretive. It was enough to motivate me to keep playing to experience the story and keep me interested.

However, some of the cutscenes had really poor animation and just didn't feel consistent throughout the game. Some had solid acting and animation, while others felt very forced with a random direction in the narrative that I found didn't make sense. It wasn't enough to take me out of the experience altogether, but I did notice it.

Deliver At All Costs - Steam Deck Performance

Deliver At All Costs is a great game to play on the Steam Deck, but there are a couple of minor issues that affect performance. Starting the game out of the box works decently well for performance, and we can hit higher framerates when driving around most of the time. I was able to comfortably hit 45 FPS, but it did drop into the mid 30s when there was too much destruction or in certain cutscenes.

As is, the game also only goes up to medium quality, which seems to be due to playing on a Steam Deck. When using the launch option SteamDeck=0 %command% to trick the game into thinking it wasn’t on a Deck, I was able to put the quality up to High, but I didn’t see a substantial difference in performance or visual quality. Because of this, I say playing without the command and running on medium will be a solid experience. There are no other graphical settings to change and nothing more advanced, so there isn’t much else we can do.

This is still a perfectly fine way to play, and I enjoyed it even at the 30 FPS lock. If you want the extra smoothness, you can increase to 45 FPS, but be ready for decent drops to 30 during cutscenes and when there’s a lot of destruction happening. I preferred the stable experience over a smoother one at certain points, but it’s an option.

アクセシビリティ

You can change your game's language, toggle camera shake, vibration, slow motion dialogue, showing tutorials, rebind keys, and change audio levels.

The does support 16:10 resolutions as well as gamepads and cloud saves. There are no HDR settings.

結論

Deliver At All Costs is a wonderfully enjoyable time with some mechanics that hold it back from being a masterpiece. The story is intriguing, while the variety of creative missions and physics-based destruction is just so much fun to play around with. However, the controls, fixed camera angles, and some missions can make the experience aggravating, while the cutscenes do have some moments with its limited animations that took me out of the immersion.

It also runs quite well on the Steam Deck, even with some smaller issues here and there. 30 FPS feels great and keeps battery drain below 15W at its highest. I would consider this a great portable experience and one worth enjoying on the Deck!

このレビューはPC版に基づいています。

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