Deliver At All Costs Review (Crentin Dalbs)
i absolutely love this game. accidentally (or purposefully) ramming through and leveling entire buildings is sublime. i hit a point where i thought the game was about to end, but nope, there's a second big series of areas! i see a lot of people complaining that certain missions are frustrating, as if that's not what the devs were specifically going for. frustration is part of the journey - you can respawn immediately if you get crushed or blown up in a mission without a loading screen, and checkpoints are very common. my only issue gameplay wise so far is during the RC car mission - if the car gets on its back it'll just flip back upright, but if it lands on its *side*, it will just stay there forever and make you manually respawn.
one thing that really sticks out to me though and feels amateurish is the voice acting - especially the audio mixing of the voices. first off, there are some instances of really bizarre language, like people refusing to use contractions in a way that makes lines feel stiff, and some lines where the emphasis is put on really, really weird words, as if they just read the line off the paper for the first with no consideration for context.
the voice recording/mixing is a mixed bag, with some characters sounding like they're using an xbox live microphone from 2006. audio on voices occasionally peaks, and the quality of the recording changes wildly from character to character - henry thompson from the big fish mission sticks out as jarringly bad in both audio quality and delivery. i understand and appreciate that the devs probably paid people from all over to record at their own home or studios, but the lack of consistency and direction rides a line between unintentionally funny and eye roll-inducing. this only stands out to me because the rest of the audio is done really well! vehicles and environments sound right. it's a big red eyesore that's made worse by how great everything around it is.
cutscenes are also really slowly paced and need a pass to tighten them. long, unmotivated pauses between lines, shots of absolutely nothing, make the cutscenes feel more like a slog than they should feel.