I have been fascinated by the game Deliver Us The Moon since it was released in 2018. When I got word that it was receiving a sequel, I jumped at the chance to review it. Sadly, I almost wish that I had never played it. Deliver Us Mars is a puzzle adventure set in a bleak future where the Earth is falling apart.

You play as Kathy Johanson, the youngest astronaut on Earth whose father was forced to abandon her as a child. She is sent to Mars on an important mission to recover technology that has the potential to save Earth and humanity. It just so happens to be technology that her father took with him when he abandoned her. You will face many obstacles as you attempt to figure out what the mysterious Outward is and what happened to your father all of those years ago.

On the gameplay side of things, the game isn’t too bad. The puzzles are a bit too easy at first, but eventually, the game adds enough obstacles and new mechanics in order to keep you on your toes. For anyone who may have played Deliver Us The Moon, the puzzles are in the same realm as the developers didn’t decide to do anything too crazy in order to reinvent the process of solving said puzzles.

For most people, this won’t be a problem since one of the biggest problems in developing a sequel is developers trying to fix a perfectly fine aspect of a game. However, I understand that some people might get bored due to the similar execution of the puzzles if they immediately go from one to the other.

The thing that hurt the experience a bit for me was the bugs that I encountered. While bugs are a common thing to deal with in games these days, this game had the misfortune to crash constantly. The number of times I got the unreal engine crash reporter pop-up was absolutely ridiculous!

There was even one time when the game crashed to the point where I couldn’t close out of it and had to reboot my entire computer. While I have experienced such bugs in the past with a few games, I had never seen this happen with such frequency in a short period of time. Hopefully, there will be a patch that solves this all, but we will have to wait.

For most games, graphics don’t really matter to me. Despite that, Deliver Us Mars‘ visual design really bothered me. Most of the game looks excellent when it comes to the backgrounds, the environments, and most of the models used for the characters. However, the faces look absolutely dreadful, so much so that it often took me out of the game when I had a cutscene that prominently showed off a character’s face. While the game does give the option to skip the cutscenes, which would’ve saved me from looking at the faces, I didn’t want to because I was rather invested in the story.

The strongest part of this game is its story. When the game failed in certain areas, the story always seemed to pick up my broken interest and carry it on to the next level. This worked for a while as the writers made sure to sprinkle just enough information here and there for me to be curious about the overall plot. I was constantly questioning the motives of certain characters.

However, there was only so far that the story could keep me invested as the bugs, graphics, and crashes eventually amounted to more than what I could bear. I give all the kudos I can to the writers, but I wish that the game would be better put together so that more people could enjoy it.

Overall, I enjoyed the main stages and story of Deliver Us Mars, however, there were a few too many problems that consistently popped up that made the experience less than enjoyable. My hope is that the game can be fixed and improved so that more people can enjoy the game. Sadly, right now it is not in a good state. If you have played Deliver Us Mars, comment below what your favorite aspect of the game is! If you are looking for other games to fuel your itch for space, check out Mike Reitemeier’s review of Chrous here.

A PC review copy of Deliver Us Mars was provided by Frontier Foundry for this review

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Deliver Us Mars

29.99

6.5

Score

6.5/10

Pros

• Excellent Story
• Puzzles That Gradually Become More Difficult

Cons

• Poor Performance
• Occasionally Hard to Look at Graphics
• A few bugs