Deliver At All Costs is a grin-inducing driving game with GTA DNA

Rising up as a child, no recreation made me smile greater than The Simpsons Hit and Run. Certain, the plethora of jokes and references to the TV collection have been nice, but it surely was the damaging, ludicrous spin on the Grand Theft Auto components that was probably the most addictive factor about it. It’s been a protracted whereas since I performed a recreation that captures that very same spirit – that was till I received hands-on with Ship At All Prices, the debut title from Far Out Video games that’s being printed by Konami.

In a nutshell, Ship At All Prices is a top-down driving recreation set in a Nineteen Fifties American city the place a down-on-his-luck and short-tempered chap named Winston Inexperienced picks up work as a courier. That sounds pretty tame, however I can guarantee you it’s completely chaotic.

The dealing with of the automobiles encourages a slidey, cartoonish driving type, nearly all the pieces you see on the earth round you might be destroyed, and the packages you ship are… unconventional. From containers of fireworks that rocket into the sky each few seconds, to an unlimited (and nonetheless writhing) marlin that was hooked by fishermen, no supply is easy. Your cargo usually has an impact on the habits of your truck too – getting airborne whereas delivering helium balloons permits you to float for lengthy distances, for instance.

A few of Winston’s courier jobs are easy fetch quests, others would require you to prioritize pace to ship a bundle towards the clock, and a few will power you into driving a bit extra fastidiously in order to not break or spill no matter’s behind your truck. Even within the 90-minute part I performed, there was a superb number of mission sorts, and I’m positive there are extra to uncover afterward within the recreation.

I used to be additionally actually impressed with the visuals and glorious aesthetics of the island city of St Monique – even when a number of the time you’re going so quick in your supply run you received’t have time to understand it. You may discover it from an isometric perspective each in automobiles and on foot, which is unsurprising provided that recreation director Daniel Nielsen cites GTA 2 as “one of many most important inspirations” of Ship At All Prices. Each exteriors and interiors are actually well-detailed, and the ‘50s imaginative and prescient is well-realized within the design of the vehicles, the type of the promoting boards and indicators, and even the music and adverts you hear on the radio.

Little secrets and techniques and foolish facet quests are scattered round too and can distract you from the principle storyline once they catch your eye. Throughout my playthrough, I discovered myself serving to a clown drive a haunted automobile right into a volcano, simply to offer you a way of how ridiculous a few of these facet quests might be. It felt paying homage to the lunacy of nonsense video games like Goat Simulator.

With the atmosphere being totally destructible as nicely, it makes for the right sandbox. St Monique isn’t a totally open-world recreation, and is as an alternative cut up into a number of sections with brief loading zones in between, however that completely didn’t matter to me.

There are just a few issues, although. Regardless of the world trying improbable from its top-down perspective, cutscenes don’t sparkle in fairly the identical method. Whereas the principle characters sound partaking and expressive, there’s some questionable voice appearing for some minor characters that feels prefer it may be AI-generated, though I can’t affirm that. And whereas we’ve all sometimes discovered ourselves driving like a law-abiding NPC in video games like GTA, that felt extraordinarily troublesome to do right here. After all, 95% of the time you want (and want) to be dashing and sliding round like a maniac, however I can see the ‘defend your cargo’ missions changing into a bit tedious because of the lack of management you may have over some automobiles.

This isn’t a lot a unfavorable, extra of a disappointment at what may have been, however Ship At All Prices goes to launch as a single-player recreation solely. I couldn’t assist pondering how sensible this recreation can be as a co-op journey, however alas, you’ll be taking over its 10 to 12-hour marketing campaign solo.

Nevertheless, these downsides don’t detract from what was a very joyful expertise. It’s been some time since I smiled this a lot whereas enjoying a recreation – it made me really feel like I used to be again enjoying Simpsons Hit and Run another time.