I can’t resist drive and deliver type games, so I decided to give this freebie on the Epic platform a shot. It’s something of a Grand Theft Auto-clone with an isometric perspective and set in 1959. Interestingly while you can step outside of your car, there’s no real combat and no one dies. The art and the world it depicts look great and it has solid voice acting throughout. It sounds like it should be good yet unfortunately it very much isn’t. Actual gameplay is frustrating due to the poor control scheme and the deliberate chaos it wants to encourage. Most of all, its makers seem much more interested in telling a story than making this an enjoyable game.

You’re Winston Green, a young man down on his luck on the island of St. Monique. Desperate to make some money, Winston applies for a job at the local delivery company We Deliver. The elderly CEO Harald welcomes Winston but Harald’s son Donovan is skeptical. Winston proves to be an effective worker despite the unconventional nature of many of the delivery jobs, such transporting a shipment of fireworks that are already going off. He is also adept in engineering and modifies his assigned pickup truck with features like a winch, a crane and even an ejection mechanism. Flashback scenes suggest that Winston was once a promising researcher but fell out with the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission after a mysterious disaster and has been branded a fugitive. Donovan inevitably discovers discrepancies in Winston’s background and with the help of the company’s security guard Gordon, tries to find out his secret. Despite Winston’s hard work, his life careen from disaster to disaster.

As the game makes clear from the beginning, none of the delivery jobs are normal. The developers boast about the destructible environment and the physics so expect plenty of mayhem and destruction all the time. Between the poor handling of your truck, the awkward controls and camera angle plus how the other cars are unbearably slow, it’s virtually impossible to have a safe, clean drive. Add to that the ridiculous loads you’re asked to transport, such as statue dragged along on a chain, and you’re basically a wrecking ball tearing up the streets. The truck is fairly tough but can be destroyed if it takes too much damage. Winston can die too even though there’s no combat from being caught in an explosion or from falling into the water. But no worries as both Winston and the truck will just respawn when that happens. There’s no real consequences to destroying the city either. At worst you’ll anger someone enough to chase after you and try to pull you out of the truck.

I’d consider the game quite difficult however as so many of the missions are timed and there’s just too much uncontrollable chaos. The end of the first act has you trying to navigate up and down a volcano as it starts to erupt. The quakes randomly toss the truck around and it’s a matter of luck if you get thrown off the dirt track. You’ll just restart at the nearest checkpoint, sure, but you may need to retry many times for some missions. I found the gameplay frustrating and not much fun at all. What’s worse is that they insist on you driving between your home and the office in between every mission. There are apparently some minor side-activities and collectibles on the maps but I skipped all of them as I just wanted to get through it as quickly as possible. Even the purchasable upgrades for the truck seem pointless as you get what you need over the course of the main missions anyway.

The real problem with this game is that it seems to want to be a movie instead. Every character has good voice-acting and there are so very many cutscenes. I’d originally expected Winston’s secret to be that he was a brilliant scientist whose experiment blew up or something. But it’s actually so much more insane that than. The issue is that all of it is conveyed in the cutscenes only. There’s nothing in the gameplay itself that reflects what actually matters in the story. You just keep delivering packages for We Deliver and important unrelated events occur in the cutscenes between missions that you have no control over. It’s not that the story is all that good either. The characters seem tonally off. It’s one thing for Donovan to take a dislike to Winston because he thinks his father is too soft-hearted and hires just anyone off the street. It’s another for him to actively plot against Winston. Gordon is introduced as a guard who asks cryptic riddles at the gatehouse and then becomes some kind of homicidal maniac? It’s all so incoherent and messed up.

I do get the vibes they were going for here. Winston is a man just trying to get through the day while everyone and everything around him seems to be putting him down until he finally blows his top. It’s a theme we’ve seen in films like Falling Down. The thing is that while the graphics are charming and the missions kind of silly, this theme is very dark and unpleasant. I did not find Winston to be sympathetic character at all as he is so bitter and set against the whole world. In the end, it’s not even clear what the writers thought they were doing as there’s no redemptive moment or catharsis at all. So yeah, not only do I not recommend this, I actively hate it. It deserves the poor reviews it got and it’s no wonder it was give away for free so soon after its release.