Deliver Us Mars Review (ouv)
Ok, so it’s needless to say that I was looking forward to this game for a long, long time. I found Deliver Us The Moon during the first year of Covid on the steam awards page and bought the game to have some fun with my new RTX GPU.
After finishing this game in one sitting I thought I’d split this review into the things I liked and the things I didn’t, and end with an overview and final thoughts section.
Things I liked:
- The story was far more developed in this game compared to DUTM. The addition of multiple NPC’s gave the team the opportunity to create a story that wasn’t solely driven by holograms which was great, and I definitely felt the story hit a lot harder this time round. No spoilers though.
- The climbing… now this is going to be in both categories, but after seeing some (and by some I mean a fuck ton of) hate towards this new mechanic, I thought I’d give you my two cents on the matter. Adding a new mechanic to a game is a risky move, especially when you make it a core part of the gameplay, it has to be perfect and natural. Sadly it wasn’t, however there were many times when I was climbing and would pull off a risky jump and I would be overwhelmed with satisfaction, just as much as solving one of the many puzzles in this game. I’ll leave my other thoughts for the other section…
- The voice acting. While a lot of this game felt rather ‘janky’, especially when the NPC’s would bug and move their lips when they weren’t talking etc… the voice acting performances saved the day. All my thanks to the great team behind the voice acting here. Voice acting is so often left as an afterthought in video games and that’s a shame because when it’s right, it makes a game 10 times better, as I learned this year after playing through RDR2 for the first time.
- The puzzles. I’ve always been a fan of puzzles in games, from Portal to uncharted, I’ve always got time for a chance to prove to myself that I’m the smartest man in existence. The puzzles in this game were, at times, hard, not impossible, but definitely a challenge I was looking for. Thumbs up team!
- Holograms. One of my favourite aspects from DUTM were the holograms, other than the silly puzzles that you have to do to before every one. I loved playing detective in the first game and watching the holograms play back while putting the story together was great to experience again.
Now for the not so good parts:
- The climbing. While I always admire the introduction of new mechanics, this mechanic was wholly unnecessary. While climbing can be a fun aspect of a game, see Uncharted, when you make it something you have to do every half an hour for a good 5 minutes at a time, it better be fun. Sadly, the developers missed the mark here, and created a incredibly frustrating mechanic that’s only value must have been to pad out an already short playtime. In DUTM there was no climbing, and yet I was not desiring for another mechanic to play around with. I had enough. Perhaps the developers felt they needed to create a mechanic to back up their decision to go third person, but for me it was unnecessary.
Rover. In DUTM you had to wait hours to drive around on the surface of the moon, and they payoff was awesome, with puzzles and objectives to accomplish while behind the wheel. Here, the rovers were solely used as a means of A to B which was really disappointing. I wish they had built upon this part of the game which they knew the fan base would love, instead of trying to force an un-fun mechanic into the game.
- Bugs. Now, at the time of this review the games been out for a whole two days so I’ll keep this short as I’m sure most of these bugs will be patched within a couple weeks. The bugs in this game were not common, but infuriating. In a game where a lot of trial and error is required to complete the puzzles, having a bug occur that locks you out of the room your meant to be in after doing a puzzle incorrectly left me having to start the chapter again, which was rather boring. In addition to this, a couple times I was left in a death cycle, respawning after trying to jump onto a wall to climb, only to fall over and over.
- NPC,s/isolation/immersion. One of the reasons I, and so many others, loved the first game was due to the level or immersion and the feeling of isolation that came along with DUTM. When I first played through I felt like some sort of space detective, solving puzzles and piecing together what happened. The developers decision to add NPC’s, that weren’t holographic, into the game and it’s core story took away from that feeling, without adding enough to make it worth it. By trying to build upon their original idea, the developers lost what made their game so good in the first place. This was only an issue in some chapters.
- Third-person. When images and trailers first came out for this game many of the fan base were concerned by the change to third person. Thankfully, for the majority of the game, especially the inside sections where immersion is key, you have the option to go first or third person. For reasons stated earlier, I chose to go first person at every opportunity. I think this change was necessary for this game due to the amount of dialogue with other characters that there is, as well as the inevitable feeling of disorientation that some players will experience in some chapters. The climbing would also have been a lot harder/impossible in first person POV.
- Helplessness. A couple of times I was left stuck due to the complete lack of explanation from the game to help me along. Sometimes I would end up tracking back to see if I was going insane, only to go straight back to where I was and find an input I had previously missed. Maybe I’m the only one that had some trouble here, but god damn, I laughed out loud at times due to the apparent simplicity of a task that I completely missed, due in some part to the game’s unnecessary complexity in the wrong areas.
Overview:
While DUM may have some issues that definitely affected my enjoyment, overall I respect and admire the confidence from the developers to add new mechanics into a game that really didn’t need it. Unfortunately, these new additions didn’t evolve the game much, and made the game feel like the original, with a few extra steps.
I think this game would have been even better received had it not bothered with all the new things and simply given the fans a new story to get lost in.
DUM holds true to DUTM and for those looking for a sequel, this is almost exactly what you’ve been waiting for.
7/10