Deliver At All Costs review - an ambitious but confused sandbox game

Deliver At All Costs wowed during Steam Next Fest back in February. Mixing GTA, Crazy Taxi, and The Simpsons Hit and Run, it tasks you with carrying out a series of increasingly chaotic courier jobs while driving recklessly through highly destructible environments, with buildings crumbling and NPCs flying into the air, legs akimbo, as you go. The two-hour demo was the perfect taster of this mayhem, enough to make many of us, myself included, return to the driver's seat of our yellow stepside truck. But the full game somehow does both too much and not enough.

driving game is set in small-town 1950s America, with the spectre of nuclear warfare lurking, but – for better or worse – it keeps its plot at arm's length for most of its first two acts.

Instead, you spend the game's first half completing tasks at your new workplace, We Deliver, including transporting a giant, jerking marlin that needs feeding en route, delivering helium-filled balloons that lift your vehicle like it's the house from Up, and driving a new statue to its destination while avoiding birds and their falling faeces. These quests are fun, and the more you drive, the more enjoyable it becomes as you grow familiar with the map and learn how to drift perfectly around every bend. But while the game gives you varied context for its quests, they still grow repetitive by the third or fourth time you've returned to the We Deliver headquarters in a day.

How you get to and from HQ is up to you. Personally, I'm a sucker for driving on the road. There's something that soothes my showboating nature when I (mostly) follow the rules, gracefully avoiding pedestrians and swerving around other vehicles, but that's not how Deliver At All Costs is best enjoyed. Plowing headlong through buildings, across farmland, and into oncoming traffic is where it shines.

As you explore, you'll encounter a small number of side quests. Marked by green question marks on the map, these range from simply picking up an item for someone or locating a specific NPC to racing a parachutist down an active volcano. Yes, that last one was great, but it's a rare high point, with most of the others being undercooked.

Yellow markers signal 'Secret Cars' around the map, such as a police car and an ice cream truck. It took me longer than I'd like to it to realize these are simply cars and not, as I assumed, more side missions. Tell me I'm not alone in thinking that stealing an ice cream truck should automatically allow you to play out your fantasies as an ice cream man?

Its biggest asset is its gorgeous recreation of the colors, style, and engineering of 1950s America, which left me nostalgic for an oft-romantized time I obviously never experienced firsthand. Similarly, most of the soundtrack has been crafted from scratch, with its range of original swing, jazz, and rock and roll tracks perfectly complementing a handful of classic songs, including Can't Wait for Summer and Billy Fury's Wondrous Place.

As convincing as its visuals and soundtrack can be, they're let down by clumsily written and delivered dialogue. Main characters fare best, but the side cast can miss the mark on inflection and emotion. At one point, the word 'pouch' is mistaken for 'poach,' which is evident in the subtitles and the actor's performance. It's both perplexing and immersion-breaking, and while developer Far Out Games has clarified that the game is "fully voice-acted," with its cast all credited, you'd be forgiven for thinking some of this is the result of AI.

Pedestrians also love to comment on your actions, uttering astute observations like "that truck's flying" and "what colorful balloons!" over and over again like a town of parrots. If I'm being exceedingly charitable, this could be a throwback to the older arcade and console games it's inspired by, though it's hard to view it as intentional when the writing in general typically falls so flat.

Its sandbox game simulation is also pretty basic. Like GTA, hitting an NPC with your car will usually cause them to give chase. If they catch you, they'll grab onto your rear bumper as you drive away until they inevitably fall off. Throughout my ten-hour playthrough, only one NPC dragged me from my car (before promptly running away). You can also get into minor on-foot altercations, but after you push them and they push you back, they'll often just walk off without a care in the world.

Cause too much destruction or mow down one too many locals, and you'll incur the wrath of the police. Again, though, this mechanic is lackluster. One or two police cars start to chase you, and you'll hop in a dumpster to get them off your tail, at which point they immediately back off. The cops also seem to leave you alone if you cross from one region into another, meaning there's no real ramification for anything you do. Consequences may not be necessary for a game to be good, but it's another indicator that Deliver At All Costs is spread too thin.

By the time act 2 is over, you're all but done with the best missions, and things suddenly take on a more story-driven shape, which was a surprise given the lack of character and plot development in the earlier hours. Sure, we have Norman, an endearing friend to Winston, and Winnie's ever-present boss, Harald, but the narrative pacing is heavily weighted to the game's back half. Reading Winston's easy-to-miss journal entries is also an absolute must if you want to follow what's going on.

Almost adding insult to injury, I started to get invested in the story toward the end of act two and thought there might be some redemption here. There's a strange, otherworldly side plot where someone from Winston's past reappears as a sweet fox, which could have gone somewhere but instead is seemingly never explained. Then, at the start of act three, the characters finally start to act with grit and personality, and you begin to understand what publisher Konami might have seen in this. Here, DAAC feels like a classic Konami action game in style, character, and design – but it's all a little too late and too stark a contrast to the preceding hours to land gracefully.

The story takes a wild turn before the end, which doesn't gel well with the characters' more serious relationships. On paper, an absurd descent from reality might fit the game's kooky premise, but in practice, it feels like a cop-out that yet again paints Deliver At All Costs as a game of competing ideas and intentions.

Despite its enjoyable action and some notable attention to detail – the traction difference when drifting in the snow, the emotional journal entries, the strength of its setting – Deliver At All Costs is just confused. There's a lot of potential here, but it could have been explored across two entirely separate and fully realized projects: one single-player story game, and one arcade driving game.