Deliver At All Costs Hands-On Preview: Part GTA2, Part Crazy Taxi, All Chaos

Konami and Far Out Games' Deliver At All Costs is one of the most fun new titles I've played this year, up there with Balatro and Starstruck Vagabond in the list of "games that gave me exactly what I didn't know I wanted." Deliver At All Costs is part GTA2, part Crazy Taxi, and part Teardown, all wrapped up in a fully explorable semi-open world with an increasingly weird 1950s setting. It's a delightful experience, and one I honestly didn't want to stop playing.

In Deliver At All Costs, players should expect - and embrace - chaos. Even the first proper mission, which sees protagonist Winston Green (voiced by Paul Cartwright) delivering a crate of fireworks, escalates faster than you'd think into glittering explosions and burning vehicles. In my brief time with the game I hauled around a giant marlin that had to be kept well-fed to prevent it from smashing nearby vehicles and businesses, I tried my best to keep 60 rotten watermelons from falling out of my truck bed in order to scam a local farmer's market, and there may or may not have been shenanigans involving a massive bomb.

Destruction and Catharsis

Nearly Everything Is In Danger In Deliver At All Costs

The world of Deliver At All Costs is divided into different medium-sized open world zones, with each representing a different district of the city. Players are able to drive any of the parked vehicles found in the world (but you can't steal vehicles that are currently being driven) and can also travel around on foot. There are both driving challenges and platforming puzzles, but it's rarely as simple as "Get from X to Y under a time limit." From what I've seen so far (and from what the Far Out Games team assures me) every mission will have something different. Considering the escalation I saw during my play session, and the meteors that feature prominently in some of the game's key art and trailer, I'm intrigued to see how much bigger it can get.

The story was surprisingly intriguing as well, one which I thought felt rather generic at first but instantly began to get more interesting upon unraveling a bit of Winston Green's backstory. There's a lot of subtle hints that not everything is as it seems in Deliver At All Costs' universe, and that becomes even more apparent once the game introduces its upgrade system. Winston isn't just a delivery driver, he's an experienced craftsman with years of experience, and it wasn't long before I was adding things like a controllable crane and hydraulic doors to my work truck.

I got sidetracked more than a few times during my preview session of Deliver At All Costs. Once was when I accidentally missed a turn and drove my truck straight through a building, then decided to spend a few minutes systematically doing it over and over on purpose to see at what point the building would collapse. Another time was when I decided to do my favorite thing in any game with open world driving, which is, of course, jumping on the hood of a car being driven by an NPC and seeing how far it can take me. These moments weren't really connected with any mission or anything I was supposed to be doing, I was just having fun.

Something Old, But Something New

Deliver At All Costs Brings Back That Xbox 360 Marketplace Vibe

When considering other games Konami is currently publishing, such as Bloober Team's Silent Hill 2 or the MGS3 remake Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater, Deliver At All Costs definitely feels like a smaller-scale project. It's not a hyper-realistic Unreal Engine 5 title, and its character models and facial interactions don't exactly feel next-gen when viewed close-up. For a game that keeps the camera pulled back 90% of the time, however, this isn't really a problem, and it allows for the main things players will be looking at - specifically, the world, vehicles, and explosions - to take center stage.

Maybe it's the isometric viewpoint, or maybe it's the way that you don't take fall damage when you jump from the roof of a three-story building to the pavement, or the way that you can knock away civilians trying to impede your progress, but Deliver At All Costs feels like an Xbox Marketplace classic in the modern era. I don't mean that derogatorily at all - the Marketplace's heyday was a fascinating time for games, a place where new indie darlings were born and many of the concepts that we take for granted now had their start. It's not perfect, but Deliver At All Costs is fun in a way that games so often aren't anymore.

Why I'll Buy It

It's Just Nice To See Original Ideas

On the day when I also attended preview sessions of Silent Hill 2 and Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater, I spent that evening thinking about Deliver At All Costs the most. It's so nice to see an isometric game that's not a generic adventure, RPG, or strategy title. It's lovely to embrace the emergent situations DAAC conjures up, like trying to replace your car's tire while angry homeowners dodge flaming debris to kick you in the shins. There's also some fantastic music (a mix of original tracks and old classics) both during cutscenes and on the in-game radio, which helps to ground the chaos amid the unsettling peacefulness of 1950s suburbia.

As someone who enjoys exploring open worlds in video games, I'm looking forward to seeing what all Deliver At All Costs is hiding. During my hour-and-a-half with the game I found out a lot about the world's inhabitants, like how the mayor has a doppleganger who attends meetings for him or how one desperate man would rather paint a giant marlin white than go to the trouble of catching a real one himself. Everyone is hiding something, including the game's protagonist, and I'm absolutely interested in finding out what.