Deliver Us Mars Review (Stan)
Honestly a shame of a sequel to Deliver Us The Moon.
The bad
How annoying, boring and plain the characters are. The animations are pretty bad, walking animations look stiff and slidey as the move speed of the characters dosnt match the leg movement speed. Most of the time theyre speaking during cutscenes there is zero body language, just stiffly standing there conversing. The writing at times for the characters is just cringeworty at times, mostly wishing they would be quiet.
The faces look very strange, you may sort of get used to them after a few hours, but mixed with the very strange facial animations. Gives off more of a creepy vibe to them than anything else. When they talk, theres very little movement outside of the mouth and their eyelids. Very very strange design choice. They could have probably felt more alive if they showed no faces and just the visor and put in effort to giving characters more defined body language when they speak or react to something.
Not enough varying puzzles, Deliver Us The Moon had far more puzzles and variations on the puzzles. Sure they were never hard, but at least they kept adding more and more small mechanics. Less than two hours in and you've probably experienced all the mechanics the game has to offer. Expect more of the same as you continue in. Climbing, line up some beams, run, cutscene, climb, line up beams, run, cutscene, and so on, and so on for hours. Deliver Us The Moon had so many more variations on the puzzles and gameplay, this isnt a step back, this is a whole leap backwards in design.
Inconsistent texture quality. Some things look fantastic, others look like there was little effort put into it. The tram you ride in the start of the game for example was pixelated as hell. The ground terrain textures at the start on Earth also looks like stuff you would have seen in games 10 years ago. Mars did look great though! When you get to the first Arc at the surface of Mars and the game tells you to look up at something, I couldnt tell what I was supposed to be impressed by as it was very obviously a green flat texture which you later find out is some impressive tech.
Performance and bugs, a lot of times during playing the game would just run terribly, 1-2 fps in cutscenes, the snow region was also plagued with terrible performance during my playthough compared to the other environments. Had a few instances where I would get phased though objects and fall to my death.
The good
Voice acting, as much as the characters were annoying, their acting was very well done. During the scenes with the holograms, they don't have faces. So the developers put in a lot of body language to convey emotions. It was much easier to depict how a character was feeling during these scenes purely based on the voice acting and quick snippets of body language they would show. These holograms and discovering the mystery are the highlight of this game for me. Much as to why I loved Deliver Us The Moon so much, as in that game all the story was done though the holograms. Your character had no face, and no voice. That game did very well at making the player feel something alone though voice acting, music and the journey.
Sound design, spot on sound design, sounds for all sorts of small details like the individual nozzels on your pack for zero g environments. The music is also great, it should have been more at the focus. The rattle and many other sounds of the ships when youre going into space. Speaking of going into space.
The launch sequences. They're very immersive, sound cool, characters are doing their roles instead of being cringe. Well done.
The ship and Mars environments (when theyre done right). For the most part when there arent odd texture issues. The environments look amazing, the artists did a great job in this sector.
Conclusion
As much as there are good, there are simply far too many negatives compared to Deliver Us The Moon for me to recommend playing this. I really hope the developers let us take on an unknown solo character with no face or voice, and let our minds take the role though perfectly designed environments with great sound design and music in their next game. Deliver Us The Moon also perfectly sold the mystery and isolation feeling, that is fully missing from Deliver us Mars. If I could give a mixed review I could. However thats not the case. I wanted to enjoy this game, but I found myself laughing at things in the story that should have probably otherwise intended to make me feel upset or bad for someone.