Deliver Us Mars Review

Published by Frontier Foundry and developed by KeonkeN Interactive, Deliver Us Mars released earlier this month; it received a mostly positive reception from the gaming community. The title is not an action packed alien horror like the recently released Dead Space remake. Instead, players enter into a puzzle-platformer, with lots of family drama and memory flashbacks. This was actually quite a relief, as with 2023 being such a heavily packed release year, I am already starting to grow tired of games that place an emphasis on combat — don’t worry though, I shall recover!

In terms of story, Deliver Us Mars gives players something interesting to hold onto right away, even if they did not experience the previous game, Deliver Us The Moon. Mars takes place in the not too distant future of the 2050s and late 2060s; you take on the role of Kathy Johanson. Starting as a child, we get to see glimpses of Kathy’s difficult family situation throughout her life. Once things get rolling, she is a young adult and the junior astronaut on an expedition to Mars. But aside from being excited to go on her first mission, the trip to Mars holds a larger significance for Kathy. The possibility of finding out what happened to her father Isaac. During an earlier flashback where we see Isaac stealing an “Ark” (an advanced colony ship), he tries to take Kathy with him but is stopped from doing so by the efforts of her sister Claire. Years later, the WSA (an international version of NASA) has received a distress call from Isaac on Mars. Armed with the location of the Ark, Claire assembles a team to bring the advanced tech home to try and save Earth from its growing environmental and energy crisis.

Gameplay for Deliver Us Mars consists mostly of laser-cutting debris and other objects out of your way, as well as using your robot companion, AYLA, to solve puzzles. Oh, and there is climbing, lots and lots of climbing — who knew ice-axes would be so handy on Mars? I’ll be honest, I always felt satisfied when I had to trace a path on an object with my wrist laser to cut into it; it was just a cool thing to do. There are also collectibles to find, such as comics and other codex entries throughout the game. I should mention that, despite it feeling a bit tedious, Deliver Us Mars features what felt like a realistic (and extensive) take-off and prep sequence — I guess rockets don’t just blast into space at the push of a button. Overall you can expect the story to take you around 9-10 hours to complete.

Being from a smaller developer, Deliver Us Mars was built on a smaller budget when compared to some of the AAA releases we have had recently. Fortunately, it was created using Unreal Engine 4, so graphically, things don’t look too bad. Though, there are some low-quality textures here and there, and once noticed they can’t be unnoticed. There are also immersion-breaking background characters at the beginning of the game that look like they have been turned to stone. They are just standing around, or sitting, with no animations. Clearly designed to be run past and forgotten about as quickly as possible. It is also worth mentioning that upon release the game was reported to have stutter and FPS drop issues. There have been two patches for PC since then — one on the 16th of February and another on the 18th.

Despite the graphical and performance issues that the game can have at times, the voice-acting is out of this world. I cannot express enough how much I loved the level of effort the actors put into their performances here. The protagonist, Kathy Johanson, is voiced by British actress Ellise Chappell, and she really brings the character to life with funny banter and sass that make Kathy an extremely enjoyable character to play as.

Though it has its faults, I was quite pleased with the end result of Deliver Us Mars. The story, gameplay, and voice-acting were enough to counterbalance the sometimes terrible textures and few technical issues that the game suffers from. I am eager to check out the previous entry in the franchise now that I have been introduced to the narrative.

Deliver Us Mars is available now on the PlayStation 4 and 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, and PC.