Deliver Us Mars Review

Deliver Us Mars Header

Deliver Us Mars picks up ten years after the end of Deliver Us The Moon. Rolf Robertsson’s one-way trip to the moon was successful in restoring the remote source of power to Earth, but it was just a bit of flex tape slapped onto a leaking water tank of disasters. It might have given power, but countless other climate and geopolitical issues persisted. So when a broken transmission comes through from the Outward group’s lead scientist Isaac Johanson, the WSA puts together one more mission to reach out into space; to Mars.

Naturally, this isn’t a straightforward assignment, with the four astronaut team facing a great deal of adversity on their journey to the red planet, a battle to simply survive once they get there, and then a mystery to resolve surrounding what happened in the intervening years and why everything seems to have been abandoned.

There’s an active feel to this game, compared to the more sedate pace of the original. Yes, there’s still plenty of exploring abandoned environments, picking up logs and triggering holograms, and some generally straight puzzling with MPT power beams, splitters and dampening fields, but our protagonist, Kathy, also comes with a pair of climbing axes. There’s shades of Tomb Raider because of this, leaping at and slamming both axes into soft rocks and heat shielding before climbing with the controller triggers, and some action sequences that stem from this.

Deliver Us Mars climbing

However, the story is the real focus of Deliver Us Mars, and this is an even more personal tale than the original. Kathy Johanson takes the lead here, a name that might be familiar to players of the original as Isaac’s youngest daughter who was on the moon in the run up to Outward’s betrayal. Now she, and her older sister Claire are some of the few highly qualified astronauts capable of taking on the mission.

Kathy’s an interesting character to figure out, her loyalties torn between the mission’s sole objective of getting to Mars and taking back the ARKs and naively wanting to be reunited with her father from whom she was separated at a young age. The game jumps back and forth between the present, flashing back to key moments in Kathy’s past, and through discovering and decoding holograms captured of events that take place on the Martian colony in the intervening years. An idyllic new civilisation, it was not…

Deliver Us Mars holograms

It all comes together quite nicely through the game, the key plot beats and revelations landing well, but there’s a degree of frustration that you’ll feel at some of the characters and their actions. Naturally that’s all a part of the storytelling craft; the story hammers home that mankind as a whole needs to respond to the threat of climate change, which seems nigh on impossible on Earth. Yet there is that friction of having world-saving McGuffins like the ARKs, where it’s not entirely clear why they couldn’t be replicated on Earth if Outward had left some blueprints behind. It ramps up the drama and the moral conundrums, but that thread isn’t tucked in.

Unfortunately, Deliver Us Mars doesn’t live up to its ambition on a technical level. It can quite often look rather good and striking, especially as the sun strikes a craggy stretch of the Martian surface that you’re navigating – the same was true of Deliver Us The Moon. This game goes beyond space suits and holograms though, and the human characters all have a very flat skin tone that sometimes catches the light in unflattering ways, their animations looking stiff and awkward outside of the various story cutscenes. It can undercut the performances at times, which is a shame when they’re generally rather good.

It’s also a bit disappointing to feel and see rough edges to the game when playing on PlayStation 5, with a number of Unreal Engine foibles that should be consigned to video game history. Textures flicker in as you quickly rotate the camera, character hair will swish as the camera cuts in cinematics, there’s a generally heavy-handed depth of field effect, and the frame pacing feels off in certain situations. Much of this could be improved with updates, and I hope it is.

Summary
Deliver Us Mars is another engaging science fiction tale with something to say about our modern world. This message is wrapped in a more personal story this time around, that’s bolder in how it tells it, and mixes it well with broader action and puzzling, so it’s just a shame that the game can’t match that ambition with some technical weaknesses even on the latest consoles.
Good
  • An engaging, layered story with something to say
  • Good blend of puzzles, story and action
  • Axe climbing is a nice addition
Bad
  • Gameplay animation is rather stiff – climbing in particular
  • Graphics and performance don't match up to the story's ambition
7
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I'm probably wearing toe shoes, and there's nothing you can do to stop me!

1 Comment

  1. Ah, i was hoping it’d do better given it’s a sequel . I had Deliver Us the Moon in my wishlist, hoping for a discount or bundle when the 2nd game released. Well, yesterday i grabbed DUTM on sale for €6 and i’m really enjoying what i’ve played so far. I’ll probably just add this one to my wishlist for the moment.

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