This absurd delivery game where you can smash through buildings was my favourite game at an event where I also played the Metal Gear Solid and Silent Hill remakes
Talk about a surprise. I confess, when I signed up to attend a Konami preview event last August, it was almost entirely to get some hands-on time with the Silent Hill 2 remake (it’s pretty good!) and Metal Gear Solid Delta (it’s very MGS3!). I knew almost nothing about the third game on the docket: chaotic, isometric delivery sim Deliver At All Costs (DAAC) from Far Out Games.
But by the time I left, DAAC was easily the game I was most excited about. No shade towards MGS or SH2, but my Mercenaries-loving self has felt a constant hunger for massive environmental destruction and physics-based ludicrousness for the last 19 years, and DAAC delivers both in spades.
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Deliver At All Costs is a ’50s pastiche that puts you in the underachieving shoes of Winston Green, a bonafide engineering genius whose short temper has kept him from ever fulfilling his potential. Down on his luck and behind on rent, ol’ Winston takes a job with a local delivery company—Deliver At All Costs—to make ends meet.
It starts with a quick drive over to the office. You know what they say: The shortest distance between two points is a straight line, and I’ll be damned if I’m not a man of science. I angled Winston’s rusty old beater towards my quest objective and hit the gas, ploughing through every park bench, lamp post, person, and building in my way.
DAAC’s world is fantastically destructible. Nothing is an obstacle to a vehicle moving at high enough speeds, and that includes the game’s structures, which can nearly all be smashed through or reduced to ruins by a dedicated enough deliveryman. Meanwhile, the town’s populace is so sproingy everyone can take go sailing after being hit by a truck travelling at 80 mph and barely feel a thing, though they will chase after you with bats and bent rebar to exact their revenge. My sojourn to the company office involved Kool-Aid Man’ing through about 16 different buildings and, friends, it really never gets old.
You can enhance your vehicle’s destructiveness through an upgrade system: Side quest rewards and mechanical parts hidden in hard-to-reach areas unlock new baffling things for your car to do. By the time I’d finished with my demo, I had full hydraulics and a functioning crane attached to my pickup. Plus, I’d unlocked a few skills for Winston himself via a separate system: “hitchhiking” and “a literal bicycle,” which came in handy when I wrecked my car (you can get it back at a phone booth).
At some point, I had wrecked the town to such an extent that I had acquired a GTA-style wanted level, pursued by cops across the game’s maps. It just made things more ridiculous: Just me and several cop cars absolutely annihilating the local area before I finally decided it was time to get a mission and leapt into a nearby trash can (you can get out of the car whenever you like) to lose them.
It’s all profoundly silly and creative in a quite old-school, videogamey way
Once you’ve got the job, your tasks only escalate in complexity and lunacy. You start out ferrying around fireworks that keep setting themselves off and destroying the environment (and your tyres), then you have to cart around 80-or-so melons that are loose in the bed of your truck without too many of them physics-ing their way out of the car and onto the road, then you’re trying to transport an enormous, flopping fish. The last job I did before I was ushered out of the demo was transporting a machine that kept spitting out helium balloons, making my car ever lighter until every slight ramp sent me sailing across half the map like James and the Giant Peach.
It’s all profoundly silly and creative in a quite old-school, videogamey way. It’s like the devs realised the only real limit to how ridiculous they could make things was their imagination and had full licence to go totally hog-wild. As much as I truly enjoyed the cinematic, highfalutin’ experiences offered by MGSD and SH2, there was something tremendously and simply entertaining about what DAAC had to offer.
Deliver At All Costs doesn’t have a set release date yet, but you can find it over on Steam.
