Even though it is surprising to see Konami publish any games after announcing that it was leaving the space during the early part of the PS4/Xbox One era, it shouldn't come as a surprise to see it publish games from much smaller outfits. It did this quite often during the PS3/Xbox 360 era with titles like NeverDead, Tornado Outbreak and the duo of Zombie Apocalypse games. It's doing it again with the likes of Cygni: All Guns Blazing and Skelattack. Its latest game, Deliver at All Costs, looks to be one of its most intriguing yet for a variety of reasons.

The game is set in 1959 in the fictional island of St. Monique. Players take on the role of Winston Green, an engineering graduate with no job who's been holed up in his dingy motel. His bills are piling up, but he hears a radio ad saying that the local shipping company, We Deliver, is looking for workers. Even though the ad should've been pulled, he gets the job anyway and begins a journey with lots of wild twists and turns.

The setup for the story already feels interesting, since we don't get too many games set in this time period. As expected from a game like this, the characters push the story along. While the cast of players isn't particularly dynamic, they play their roles well, and they give players a reason to hate who they're supposed to and empathize with everyone else, even if a character or two seems to appear out of thin air.

The thing that people will remember the most is the story itself. The narrative takes place across three acts, and while the first act is seemingly straightforward, the conclusion means that the beginning of the second act is a bit of a downer. Things pick up a bit, but by the end of the second act, the tone and your emotions are all over the place. Intrigue mixes with sadness, and the result is a plot twist that no one saw coming. By the third act, the game becomes more erratic, and now the story can't be classified within one genre. It's hard to say whether the end will satisfy everyone, and there are moments when you'll question how certain circumstances came to be, but it'll be tough to find someone who isn't intrigued enough to see it through to the end.

One look at the gameplay trailers gives you the idea that Deliver at All Costs takes some inspiration from the classic Grand Theft Auto titles. This has the feeling of an open world split into three cities, but those cities are segmented into zones, which are fairly small and have transition points that have short loading times between them, so it isn't exactly seamless. You're playing from an isometric viewpoint instead of a 3D one, but you can rotate the camera within a limited range. You can travel the world on foot, but almost all of your missions involve driving in your truck or other assigned vehicle.

You can grab vehicles that are parked or being driven by others, but your main mode of transportation is your delivery truck. That's important, since the truck can be outfitted with a few power-ups, like a horn that can move others out of the way and a time manipulation device that can slow down things to allow for tighter turns or quicker driving decisions. It's too bad that you can only have one power-up equipped at a time, so those hoping for spiked wheels and a rocket booster are out of luck. The truck can also have a crane for packages and a winch to lift and tow things, but those tend to be mission-specific improvements, unless you manually equip them. The truck can also be repaired before it blows up. You may have a blown set of wheels, but you can always leave the truck and hit a button to replace them. Many phone booths can be used to call in a new truck, so there's rarely the desire to take control of another vehicle.

Destructibility is also a big thing in Deliver at All Costs. About 90% of the objects and buildings in the world can be driven through and taken down without damaging your car too much. Unless there's a yellow ladder that can be climbed, you can decimate the world and watch it crumble as if you were playing Teardown, minus the use of voxels. The level of destruction is inherently fun, but it's too bad that you have to break things yourself, since only the final mission in the game focuses on this aspect of the title.

The sense of violence is toned down greatly from what's expected. You can run over people with your car, but no one dies. On foot, you can only kick inanimate objects, and the only thing you can do to pedestrians is push them. They can retaliate by pushing you back, and if you hit them with your car, they can run after your vehicle and hit it with a chainsaw or overhead smash. When it comes to cops, only one tenacious cop car comes out when you start to wreak havoc, and the penalty for getting caught is to respawn in a new spot with no item loss. With no guns or blood in sight, this a relatively safe sandbox-style game if you don't mind the occasional swearing.

When you're not roaming around the world, the game has you activating missions via your truck radio and driving to marked locations to complete the missions. When compared to the story, the missions feel fairly absurd and snowball from there. Your first mission has you delivering a crate of fireworks to a hotel — while the crate is firing those fireworks and hitting anything in its path. One mission has you delivering a statue while avoiding the seagulls that are trying to poop on it. Another sees you driving RC cars to homes while avoiding the cops in their own RC cars who are trying to crash into you. Each delivery mission is goofy in their own way, and it isn't until the third act when those assignments start to become more conventional. Interestingly, the missions and the story never reach that point that the tone feels balanced, so you're always stuck with the feeling of being in a very off-kilter world.

If you can forgive the constant tonal shifts, you'll find that the experience is breezy. The game is still challenging, especially where you'll need lots of practice and luck to make it through a mission relatively unscathed, but the game ensures that frustration is kept to a minimum. Failing in a mission takes you back to the last checkpoint with barely any loading, and the number of checkpoints in each mission is plentiful enough that you don't travel too far to reach your death spot. Most missions keep enough of your progress that it may be beneficial to take a loss to reset a meter to give yourself an advantage. While some missions take a few twists that may feel unnecessary at the time, the game isn't loaded with filler missions, and you aren't required to suss out every upgrade to finish the game. For a campaign that lasts an average of nine hours, the experience doesn't feel that long, even if you fail the tougher missions a few times.

Aside from some of the gripes mentioned earlier, there is one other aspect of Deliver at All Costs that people will have a tough time coming to grips with: the vehicle controls. They seem fine when looking at the options, since they're the standard racing controls, but the isometric viewpoint can trip up players enough that they'll initially drive in the wrong direction. You can go with the simplified scheme, where you can point to where you need to go instead of thinking of it as a steering wheel. However, there's still a learning curve because the standard scheme feels more responsive. The controls aren't terrible, per se, and you'll get used to them quickly, but don't be surprised if you have to reorient yourself after stepping away from a car for a bit. Another somewhat-related issue is the platforming. You're fine most of the time, but things get dicey when you're trying to maneuver some scaffolding and find that you're missing jumps because you're either not lined up correctly or you're not on the platform at all.

Graphically, the game is mostly good. Considering the level of zoom on the camera, the environments look great, and there's loads of detail visible on the buildings and streets. That really comes out when you start destroying buildings because you can see a ton of detailed debris fly in all directions. The same can be said for the character models, which look good in the environment and still look good in cut scenes when you consider that the level of detail isn't necessary. Where the game falters in this regard is with the mouth animations. You get an early PS2-era animation set, where mouths move like a bunch of jittering polygons versus something that's somewhat natural. It looks strange, but the game's camera work does a good enough job at not focusing on the mouths, so the jittering isn't too bothersome.

Like the graphics, the audio is mostly great. The character voice work is impressive, and you get an immediate sense of each person's personality and how they fit together in this offbeat world. The music is the real highlight, and while there are a few licensed tracks, everything else is an original composition that sounds authentic to the era while also giving each area a unique feel, from the country twang of the lumbermill to the hint of surf rock and everything in between. The only knock is that each area only has one track. It's great if you want to immediately identify where you are, and you'll be traveling back and forth between areas enough times that the soundtrack still sounds varied, but it is something you'll pick up on after just a bit of time.

For Steam Deck users, Deliver at All Costs runs quite well if you can live with some caveats. The game runs at 1280x800, and while you can change some of the graphical options, the texture quality is capped at Medium, which looks fine thanks to the Deck's low-resolution screen. The frame rate can bounce between 40fps-60fps, depending on what's happening on-screen at any moment, but the game remains very playable throughout. Battery life on the LCD version hits around two-and-a-half hours on a full charge; that's low but not egregiously so. Overall, the experience is good.

Deliver at All Costs is a wild ride for a variety of reasons. The difference in tone between the story and the missions creates a strange, disconnected experience that makes the game more intriguing than off-putting. The gameplay is solid, with the mission forgiveness and leeway for creating mayhem being the real highlights. The extreme destructibility is simply an added bonus. The presentation may be a tad flawed in places, but it's still good enough to make this a pleasant experience, especially since the game doesn't last so long that the concept starts to feel stale. Deliver at All Costs is a fun game overall, and it's well worth checking out for those looking for something a bit quirky in their sandbox experiences.

Score: 8.0/10