There can be a hypnotic nature to repetitive tasks, and plenty of games have leaned into that to give otherwise humdrum jobs a surprising allure. Deliver At All Costs goes in the opposite direction and transforms the unforgiving tedium and thankless nature of a courier job into an explosive, slapstick adventure. This makes for some fun and brief thrills, but too often Deliver At All Costs falls into repetitive monotony with an overly cyclical format, a dragging story, and unexciting in-game upgrades.
Narratively, Deliver At All Costs has a fantastically intriguing opening. You play as Winston, an extremely gifted engineer who’s late on rent, bereft of friends, and prone to outbursts of anger. He sees visions of a strange fox, someone is spying on his apartment, and he’s hiding something about his past. It’s all very mysterious and strange, and the setup immediately draws you into the story in hopes of uncovering who Winston truly is and what’s going on.
The mystique hangs over the first hour of Deliver At All Costs, which sees Winston take a truck-driving job at We Deliver, a courier service. Every delivery forces Winston, and by extension the player, to contend with a new type of challenging cargo, like surprisingly strong balloons making Winston’s truck extremely buoyant and prone to soaring over buildings at the smallest bump, or a statue that attracts a flock of seagulls obsessed with carpet bombing the statue with poop.
In that first hour, I really liked this dichotomy in Deliver At All Costs, as the intriguing mystery of who Winston was contended with the ludicrous absurdity of Winston’s present. The rigid and poorly mapped facial animations of the characters are as ridiculous as the poor writing, but I convinced myself that there was a possibility this was a purposeful choice to add an uncanny element to the people around Winston and further feelings of unease about his surroundings. And the slow drip-feed of details about who Winston is during each delivery felt like it was building up to a greater revelation.
Ultimately, Deliver At All Costs’ story doesn’t really deliver on the mystery it opens with, though. You do learn more about Winston, and the story ultimately takes a truly wild turn, but the reveals aren’t all that satisfying of a reward and don’t feel in-line with what the first chapter was setting up. It becomes clearer after that first hour that the uncanny animations and bizarre pacing of the story aren’t in service of a greater strangeness, but rather a byproduct of its aimless direction.
The gameplay is the far bigger focus for Deliver At All Costs, and much like the story, it wanes with time. Almost everything in Deliver At All Costs is fully destructible and Winston’s truck is practically invincible, allowing you to carve through street lamps, fences, and buildings like they aren’t even there.
Initially, it’s ridiculous fun to plow through half of a town to complete a delivery in record time, blasting your horn and plowing through any hapless citizens who refuse to heed your warning. There’s no consequence to your actions: If you do cause enough destruction to attract the attention of the police, you can immediately negate any heat you’ve raised by hopping into a dumpster–you don’t even have to break the cops’ line of sight (and if you are caught, the penalty is so minor, it might as well be nothing). If Winston dies or loses his delivery, the game quickly respawns you, thanks to generous autosave checkpoints. And no matter how destructive you are, Winston’s truck can’t be stopped or lost either–it flips itself upright on its own, can be fixed with a single button press, and teleports to you when you stop into any of the phone booths on practically every street corner.
It’s initially a joy to be so invincible, but that diminishes with each subsequent hour as the novelty of the setup wears off. There’s no incentive to be destructive other than wanting to. You don’t earn anything for demolishing a building or plowing through a group of citizens. There’s no benefit for completing a delivery as fast as possible, with as many casualties as you can, or with as few restarts as you can muster. The game doesn’t care about any of that. Winston is just an angry guy and Deliver At All Costs allows you to revel in that fantasy by being as destructive as you want with minimal repercussions. The issue, of course, is that the game is so uncaring of your destruction, that it begins to feel superfluous and dull after a while.
This design decision means that the game doesn’t throw any meaningful challenges in your way either, and if you aren’t really penalized for doing anything wrong, there’s no real opposition to anything you’re tasked to do and a shrinking sense of reward with every successful mission. This leads to the structure of the game feeling overly cyclical, with Winston waking up, getting a job to take an object from one spot to another, doing so, and then returning to his residence to go to sleep for the day and progress the story–the mayhem he did or did not cause is meaningless to him and all of the other characters, and this slowly makes it meaningless to the player.
There are a few times Deliver At All Costs at least breaks free from the sameness of this formula to give Winston a task that’s a bit more unorthodox than delivering a package from point A to B, and this is when the game’s enjoyment really varies. Some of these missions are ridiculous fun–like breaking through buildings to chase down trucks of a rival delivery company, stealing their packages, and racing to deliver them yourself while utilizing your knowledge of the town to strategically leave enough destruction in your wake to hold off your rivals now in hot pursuit–but just as many are irritatingly awful, like ascending an erupting volcano and maneuvering through nearly impossible-to-dodge rockslides. A few of the traditional delivery assignments aren’t all that fun either, like a mission that forces you to ignore enjoying the joyous destruction to slowly drive through the streets and keep a bunch of melons from rolling out of your truck’s flatbed. It’s not a challenge; it’s just dull. Moments like these could have been improved with humor, and the writing does strive to be funny, but the game’s jokes regularly fall flat.
Optional assignments and collectibles fail to break up the tedium of the game’s repetitive cycle. As far as I can tell, there are no secrets to discover in Deliver At All Costs–the map marks where every crafting material-filled chest, “secret” car, or citizen in need is, so it’s always clear where you can go if you want a break from the story.
Crafting materials are used to build upgrades to Winston’s truck, like a horn so loud it can shatter windows or enforced doors you can quickly open to splatter a citizen you missed running over. As noted before, however, destruction is an optional addition, not a necessary component of each mission–causing more of it more easily does not change how the game is played, so all of the upgrades feel unfulfilling and unnecessary. A few of the mandatory truck upgrades (that are naturally unlocked as you continue in the story) make aspects of the delivery process easier, like a crane letting Winston load and unload cargo without having to get out of the truck, but they don’t affect the experience of playing the game beyond removing steps in the overall delivery process.
The cars hidden around the map are similarly not worth going for. Most of them handle exactly like Winston’s truck, and you can’t use them to conduct deliveries anyway. There’s no garage to bring them to either–their sole purpose is an option to drive through the world and destroy it with a different-looking car.
The citizens who ask Winston for help are an easy skip too, held back by the game’s writing. Their side missions themselves at least offer interesting distractions–driving a possessed car that tries to run itself off the road up to the fires of a volcano to destroy it, finding a mayor lookalike hidden somewhere on the map, and crashing through everything you can to scare the greedy executives you’re ferrying around, among others. But the stories told around them don’t excite or offer anything to chew on narratively. It’s such a shame. Deliver At All Costs celebrates 1950s aesthetics and has such pretty and detailed locations, but I don’t want to spend any extra time in them.
Deliver At All Costs is a solid game for an hour. But then the formulaic nature of delivering goods from point A to point B becomes tiresome. Enacting wanton destruction and experiencing the unique setup of each delivery for the first time creates brief thrills, but breaking stuff just to break it doesn’t remain enjoyable for long and the meandering and unfulfilling story that connects each delivery drags the whole experience down. Parts of Deliver At All Costs work really well, but it too often ruins its own fun.
