Just before my group of four young astronauts with big personal conflicts of interest flew to the Red Planet, our team leader decided to take a few corners to make our ship endure space. I had to cut the , but I’m sure it should do its job. fine. And it’s… kinda. It’s a great metaphor for the whole of Deliver Us Mars. This platforming, puzzle-solving, and interplanetary adventure is too little, too much, and ultimately just not right.
Our courageous, rebellious, and sometimes lovable hero, Cassie’s backstory is that she was separated from her father, Isaac, just before boarding a colonization mission to Mars. attends astronaut school on a climate-ravaged Earth, but a mysterious transmission from Isaac prompts her and her sister Claire to seek seats on a mission to reclaim a colony ship. The regular flashbacks do an admirable job of filling in the family’s complicated and painful story along the way.
The launch sequence from Cape Canaveral is one of the most powerful. Various checks and landing procedures must be performed. This is what feels real and tactile before you see your ship, her Zephyr, leave the Earth’s atmosphere through the front window without any cuts or loading screens. Not pre-explained about these steps, a lot of me frantically spinning my mouse pointer trying to find the switch highlighted for internal power supply spacing or something, but once you get the hang of it it works did it’s.
Outside of these scripted sequences, Deliver Us Mars consists of first- and third-person exploration of orbital facilities and the surface of Mars itself, featuring fairly straightforward puzzle solving and occasionally frustrating platforming. There are several sections where you must match the voltages of the doors and terminals to bounce off the wireless power beams in order to reach the next area. They’re generally not that hard, but I did find some tricky ones that were satisfying to solve.
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Less satisfying were these uncomfortable climbing wall segments. You also need to click with plenty of room to avoid slipping off the climbing surface. However, this action is so unresponsive that whether or not you can buy it feels more random than anything else, especially when you have to jump at an angle. There is one movement that is not explained at all. I stumbled across it when I was frustrated and trying random buttons after being stuck for a few minutes.
This lack of direction extends to some segments of the main story. You can go in a few different ways, and you might end up wandering in the wrong direction without ever being told which one is right. There’s an option under accessibility to always show quest markers, and while you don’t necessarily need a big star to guide you through every step all the time, you can actually use some sort of middle ground. If you tell me to go without telling you anything, it seems like you’re really letting me go.
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At least the characters are compelling. What are some of them, anyway. Neil Newborn (who you may remember as the maniacal Heisenberg from Resident Evil: Village) gives a great performance as Isaac, a complex character with conflicting motivations. brought to life by Elise Chappell, who delivers a wide and convincing performance of And the story is admirable, with the mystery of what happened to the Martian colonists pushing me forward every time.
However, the character models really can’t keep up. A lot of backstory is delivered. There, a hairless, faceless crash test dummy poses in place while dialogue plays. A placeholder seen in an unfinished game. He looks like art, but the developers didn’t have the time or resources to replace it. There’s also an entire chapter at the end that jumps from one scene to something completely unrelated, and it feels like it cut a fair amount of plot without doing a very good job of piecing it together.
Performance, especially during cutscenes, is also a big issue. My RTX 3080-powered system is over the recommended specs, but even with DLSS on, framerates were occasionally below 10 fps in many cinematics. I had to turn off per-strand hair rendering completely. For normal gameplay it’s usually fine. But this is clearly not an optimized project.
