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Deliver Us Mars is exactly the kind of sci-fi Tomb Raider I can get behindSpace to breathe
Space to breathe
Image credit:Frontier Foundry
Image credit:Frontier Foundry
There’s a good reason for this, though, and it’s one that actually enhanced my experience of the game as opposed to detracting from it. You see, while heroine Kathy might look like an auto-climbing Lara Croft-stronaut, with her pair of pickaxes dangling off her suit, in practice she’s anything but. In fact, when she’s climbing up and down walls, Kathy has more in common withGrow Home’s little BUD bot than anyone else - albeit with a significantly higher polygon count. As she carries out her quest to look for tech to save Earth from an impending climate crisis, players manually control her climbing movements with pushes and squeezes of their right and left mouse buttons, plotting a course through the game’s gnarled mess of girders and metallic bulkheads one axe stab at a time. It’s a slow, but wonderfully tactile process, and it all adds up to launch Deliver Us Mars straight out of the trad, third-person action canon, and into the altogether starrier realms of platforming pioneers.
Deliver Us Mars | Story TrailerWatch on YouTube
Deliver Us Mars | Story Trailer
Of course, if you caught James’Deliver Us Mars Gamescom previewback in August, none of this will come as much of a surprise to you. In that earlier demo, Kathy’s climbing was very much front and centre there as well, which left James similarly impressed despite some slightly stiff animations. I never saw that earlier build, so can’t vouch for its technical quality, but there was certainly nothing during my preview session that gave me cause for concern. If nothing else, it proved that Keoken’s decision to delay the game to February 2nd next year was the correct one.
On second thought, I should have called the cake splitter a giant Oreo with legs…
Still, even if all Ayla can muster is the occasional bleep and bloop, she sure is handy to have around. Indeed, while Kathy can do a bit of manual manoeuvring of her laser splitters on the ground, she can’t jump with them or lift them to higher surfaces. Enter Ayla, who can easily levitate all manner of objects and plonk them down wherever they’re needed - including some high-up platforms where multiple battery stations need their own respective power sources. Working together with Ayla to get everything in position was key to solving this second major puzzle, and it felt like a satisfying evolution of the one I’d solved earlier. If Keoken can keep building on their puzzles like this further down the line in Deliver Us Mars, it could end up quite the pleasing brain teaser (although I’ll need a bit more variety than just lasers and splitters - there’s only so many of those they can throw at me before it starts to get a bit rote).
Powering up the satellite dish’s control room was easily one of the highlights of my entire demo.
Ayla’s good for more than just being a laser splitter pack horse, though. Given her dinkier proportions compared to Kathy, she can also morph ball it through sneaky vents and passageways to get into rooms Kathy can’t, so you’ll need to be on the lookout for these as you progress. But whereas other third person games would simply have you tap a button in these cases to let your AI companion do it all for you (coughGod Of War againcough), Deliver Us Mars puts you in direct control of Ayla’s movements, allowing you to pilot her in first-person with a tap of the C button. Again, this isn’t all that dissimilar from Deliver Us The Moon, nor is it that revolutionary in isolation. But in an age where so much third-person puzzle solving is becoming increasingly automated these days, it just feels refreshing to actually do it all yourself for once, you know?
So yes, I ended up stretching a lot of muscles in my hand I didn’t even know I had while playing Deliver Us Mars, but I also wouldn’t trade those aches for anything. It felt good to be wholly invested in what I was doing and to have the creaking joints to show for it afterwards, and I only hope the rest of Deliver Us Mars makes good on the foundations Keoken have set down here during the rest of its story. If nothing else, the delay until February 2nd 2023 should hopefully give me enough time to establish a proper exercise routine for my wasted ligaments, as I’d like to be in peak condition to see if it really can, err, deliver on what I’ve seen so far.
