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WARNING - CONTAINS SPOILERS
To be fair, Deliver Us Mars is not without its high points. The environmental design is top notch, particularly in the larger scenes when I’d actually found myself stopping just to take in my surroundings. I didn’t even find the much-maligned climbing mechanic to be as bad as some people claim, though I will admit it gets old pretty quickly. The voice acting is great, and the story pacing is solid, never leaving you feeling rushed or bogged down.
Unfortunately, while the story’s pacing is solid, the same can’t be said of the story itself. Because while it’s fair to ask a player to overlook a bit of forced drama or the occasional small plot hole for the sake of the narrative, it’s another thing entirely to have characters losing their temper over easily resolved non-issues or making massive nonsensical decisions just to advance the plot.
Especially when those characters are supposed to be astronauts, who aren’t exactly known for losing their cool under pressure.
Even the inciting event behind the game’s whole story, the Lunar colonists’ decision to travel to Mars, is based on reasoning that doesn’t stand up to a moment’s scrutiny. I found it hard to believe that rather than use the Ark technology to help Earth, they could justify abandoning an entire planet based on the idea that “If we handed the Arks to the people on Earth, they wouldn’t share”. Could they not put the Ark specs online for anyone to access? Amongst all these wonderous futuristic technologies, did no one have a spare flash drive?
Even if you can ignore all that, though, there’s still no escaping the fact that Deliver Us Mars is a supposedly hard science fiction story than seems to have forgotten the whole science part. Because that’s the thing about hard science fiction: it challenges the storyteller to show their audience something that’s both futuristic and believable...or at least, believable enough. I’m more than willing to suspend my disbelief over stuff like cryogenic suspension or absurdly thin EVA suits, so long as they don’t fly right in the face of the actual technologies they’re based on.
And unfortunately, that’s exactly what happened in Deliver Us Mars, which clearly wanted to be a hard sci-fi story but too often ended up flying right past “believable enough” to land squarely in “nonsense” territory.
A perfect example of this, and the one thing that kept shattering my immersion in the story, was all the large spaces. Pressurized vessels – whether we’re talking spacecraft or submarines – tend to be pretty cramped inside, because every extra square inch of internal area requires additional resources to sustain. That’s why the Zephyr, the NASA ship our protagonists take to Mars at the beginning of the game, with its small rooms and narrow corridors, was totally believable. But the Martian colony structures and Ark ships, with their high cathedral-like ceilings and wide-open communal spaces? Not so much.
But the worst offence (in my opinion) is in Chapter Eight, when you need to navigate the wreckage of Ark Labos after it crash lands on Mars in order to see if its still capable of...actually, it doesn’t matter. The idea that anything could function in any way following an uncontrolled Martian re-entry is absolutely batsh*t insane. Why? Because even though Mars has less than half Earth’s gravity, its thin atmosphere means that terminal velocity is way higher - about 1000 km/h. After impacting at that speed, Ark Labos wouldn’t have been a wreck so much as a several-mile-long debris-filled trench.
With that in mind, you can imagine why hearing Kathy say “I hope the hydraulics are still working.” had me rolling my eyes.


THE BOTTOM LINE:

Deliver Us Mars looks and sounds great, but misses the mark story-wise. Plus, if you’re at all familiar with the principles of real-world physics, engineering, or space travel, there are some things in this game that I guarantee will bug the absolute sh*t out of you.