Deliver Us Mars review

Once the source of wild speculation about the existence of extraterrestrials, our neighboring planet Mars can be said to have become a familiar place. We have all seen photographs from the Red Planet, which were taken by special spacecraft and rovers that literally drove over its surface. Mars may have revealed some of its secrets, but many mysteries remain to be revealed. Take these words as a premise to Deliver Us Mars .

space opera

I'll be pretty careful about the Deliver Us Mars story. This is the most that neither is a narrative adventure. The main emphasis is on unraveling the main mystery and finding answers to a few more targeted, family questions. You play as Katie Johansson, a girl who dreams of exploring space because it's literally in her DNA. As a child, she saw her father and older sister shuttle between the dying Earth and her satellite, the Moon. The girl already then dreams of going to the moon. She gets her wish, only to see her father escape the moon in one of the three Arks built to save humanity and head for Mars.

Years later, we see a grown-up girl working for the WCA space agency, which made her father both a hero and a traitor. A distress signal comes from the Martian planet. Transmitted by Isaac Johanson, Katie's father. In the end, the girl ends up on Mars, and, not surprisingly, her spaceship crashes. Faced with the unknown, she must solve several problems. In addition to the banal search for a way to leave the planet, Katy wants to know what happened to her father and what disaster befell the Martian Arks, why their creators did not fulfill their promise to save Zemi. The fate of several other characters and how the story ends are all in the spoiler realm, so I will bypass it.

The narrative behind Deliver Us Mars certainly contains a few surprises and twists. It's a completely linear experience, with some of the plot twists conveyed through holograms and other environmental cues. Being a kind of continuation of Deliver Us the Moon, it is tonally in line with the previous game. My biggest gripe with this story is that some of the plot points and characters rely on pretty hackneyed imagery. A child flying on a toy rocket dreams of space. A brave young girl who is dissatisfied with her superiors. Much of the gameplay of Deliver Us Mars is mechanically similar to Deliver Us the Moon.

Puzzles and platforming

While I can't dive too deep into the plot, it's possible to go into more detail about the mechanics of Deliver Us Mars. Like Deliver Us the Moon, this is an adventure game based on puzzles and exploration. As in the first game, Katie does most of her research alone, but she has a robot drone that helps with some puzzles by moving around the environment and placing objects as needed.

There are several types of puzzles in Deliver Us Mars. In some, Cathy directs energy beams at receivers to open doors or new areas for the story to progress. Often in tandem with these puzzles, Kathy must figure out how to move through a location, climb walls, jump, and get to seemingly inaccessible places. Simply put, the end goals of the puzzles are not always clear. Where I experienced some disappointment was Cathy's inaccurate and mechanically raw movement. Games that involve jumping and climbing walls should prioritize these mechanics. Whether it's on Earth or on Mars with less gravity, Katy's jumps seem somehow unpredictable and clumsy. The way she climbs the walls with two pickaxes looked like the process was missing a few frames of animation for each movement.

Like many games on the same budget, Deliver Us Mars features excellent level design and interesting puzzles, but the lack of polish in the movement mechanics makes it hard to enjoy.

Thanks to real images from Mars, recent movies and games, we have a pretty good idea of what the Red Planet looks like. Deliver Us Mars features impressive sepia-toned landscapes, huge derelict spaceships with ghosts of the past, and dizzying heights. Visually, the game is a significant step up from Deliver to the Moon, moving closer to looking like a big budget title.

Character models - especially faces and subtle expressive animation - are still under development. Sometimes they are clumsy enough to detract from the well-constructed (though not always inspiring) dialogue. As noted, the lack of precision in character animation affects both gameplay and aesthetics.

Deliver Us Mars features great music and sound design by Sander Van Zanten. The music is a synthesis of orchestral samples and electronic textures. The sound design meets the needs of creating sound for all internal and external sounds of the spacecraft and planets, and even takes into account the influence of the Martian atmosphere.

Get us a sequel...

After a rocky start, Deliver Us the Moon has become a successful adventure game, and Deliver Us Mars won't disappoint fans of the first game. It tells an interesting, and in some ways amazing story, and the Red Planet and soundtrack create the right atmosphere, especially when you are not inside objects, but on the surface of the planet. Some imperfect mechanics and puzzles carry over from the previous game, but overall, Deliver Us Mars is a solid step forward for an established franchise.

I don't think this will be considered a huge spoiler, but the developers of the game are so confident in their abilities that in the very finale they added a bold hint of a new sequel. How exactly - find out for yourself!