Deliver at All Costs casts you as a delivery driver in the late 1950s, and it looks fantastic in motion. Almost everything on the map can be destroyed, and there is immediate fun to be had from causing merry mayhem with your truck, clattering through deckchairs on the beach or driving straight through the middle of a diner and watching it collapse spectacularly behind you. But there is a void at the heart of this game where the core hook should have been.
We get a glimpse of its potential during a mission that sees you racing to catch up with a rival’s delivery truck before it can reach its destination. The aim is to manoeuvre alongside, and hold down a button so the crane on the back of your own truck can sneakily lift the package off their vehicle and on to yours. All the while, rival trucks are attempting to ram you off the road, and after you grab the package, you then have to deliver it while fending off the attentions of these other drivers. It leads to some wonderfully comic scenes in which a hotel owner thanks you profusely for a consignment while standing in front of the ruins of his newly destroyed establishment: a casualty of the violent act of delivery.
This one frantic mission is by far the best part of the game, and if the rest of Deliver at All Costs followed a similar path – a Crazy Taxi-style mad dash against the clock between pickup and delivery, with whole neighbourhoods razed in pursuit of logistical efficiency – then there would no doubt be a few more stars stuck to this review. Instead each mission varies wildly in content and quality. Some are passably enjoyable, including one that involves taking photos of a UFO while avoiding its laser beam. Others are simply dull, such as one in which you deliver balloons tied to the back of your truck, which intermittently cause it to rise into the air: more irritating than entertaining. Zany does not equal fun.
If all of that kind of thing had been confined to side missions while the main game was about zipping parcels back and forth as quickly as possible, it might have worked. But these hit and miss escapades are all we get, and by the final third, the concept of delivering things is ditched completely. Instead Deliver at All Costs tells a dim-witted story through relentless dull cut scenes, with writing and acting that veer from passable to downright rotten. Protagonist Winston Green is a man with a murky past who ends up at loggerheads with his boss, Donovan, before the game jumps the shark entirely and veers off into po-faced sci-fi nonsense. It doesn’t help that the permanently angry Winston is one of the most unlikable video game protagonists ever created.
As in Grand Theft Auto, you can hop out of your car and explore, but here there’s hardly anything to find, save for a few viewpoints (which are just that) and a tiny handful of side missions. These range from fun (race a parachutist down a mountain) to boring (find a man who looks like the mayor). There is the occasional unique car to discover, but as you have to use your delivery truck for most missions, doing so is largely pointless. The novelty of driving around in, say, a hot dog van wears off in seconds. There are crates full of cash to find too, but there’s little of note worth buying. The shop sells spare parts you can use to assemble gadgets for your truck, but apart from the boost-giving jet engine, they’re mostly superfluous.
It’s all so frustrating. Deliver at All Costs offers up a beautiful destructible playground, then barely utilises it, instead focusing on a bizarre, half-baked story that somehow ends in a courtroom drama. It feels like being invited to a glittering champagne reception, then getting collared by a conspiracy theorist who insists on describing the plot of his hokey sci-fi novel for the next eight hours. What a criminal waste.
Deliver at All Costs is out on 22 May, £24.99