Deliver Us Mars: A decent game plagued with some annoying issues

I don't know what you would really categorize this game as but I suppose it is kind of like a story-driven puzzle adventure game. The story is what is really important here and for the most part, the story is actually really good. We find ourselves controlling the daughter whose father stole a shuttle of sorts and then escaped to Mars, becoming an enemy of Earth's population in the process. As the daughter "Moonbear" we see the game through her eyes and what she discovers along the way about her father's motives for doing what he did. The story is strong and we start to notice things about our heroine's life even before she was a top scientist and astronaut with the space organization. Even though I generally don't care for games that are all about the story, they did a very good job with this one. It kind of has a "What became of Edith Finch" feel to it, although not quite as dramatic.

src

I would also consider this game very casual-gamer friendly in that for almost all of the portions of the game, you can't really lose. There's the occasional fall-to-your-death sequences that are more annoying than they are difficult, but you never get sent back a huge distance when this happens. Also, some of the portions where you have to cut certain things with your plasma torch or whatever the hell it is, it is just a question of keeping at it until you get it done. I have only encountered one single instance where anything was on a timer.

This is all fine and dandy and it makes for some very casual gaming that appeals to me if I am in the right mood. The story unfolds rather quickly or I should say at just the right pace. It is kind of like a movie at times but other times you are completely in command of where the character goes and does and it is just an eventuality that you are going to progress with little difficulty.

However, it is this very simplicity that sometimes becomes a problem as far as gameplay progression is concerned.

src

Take for example the climbing portions of the game that you are introduced to shortly after arriving on Mars. These are fun at first but you quickly bore of them because they aren't at all difficult, they are just tedious and quite time-consuming because I guess they were going for realism as far as how fast a female human could realistically climb with a spacesuit on. This means that you climb extremely slow and the alternating between R2 and L2 over and over again is just kind of dumb. I say this because there is very little chance of failure unless you get impatient - which I did - and then you fall to your death most of the time.

Here is the part of the game that makes me the most frustrated about it and I can't imagine what went wrong with this as far as programming or design is concerned.

src

If there is one thing that I truly hate about modern day gaming with our hyper-realistic graphics it is some variation of the above. Personally, I would prefer that the graphics be significantly less realistic so that I don't have to spend 90 seconds doing nothing while I wait for something to load that often times ends up being some insignificant something or other anyway. This is frustrating even when whatever is loading is important but I draw my "frustration line" at the point where the same section I was just doing, apparently has to be completely reloaded into memory as if I was entering whatever area that is in for the very first time. So when you do accidentally fall to your death it appears as though the game has to completely reload the entire area into memory from scratch instead of simply putting you back to the nearest area that you were on solid ground. In my mind, this is just terrible programming and I am annoyed by this when I encounter it in any game at all.

src

Then we have the "beam puzzles" which are pretty cool the first couple of times that you do them but then they just become a regular part of what you have to accomplish in order to progress and as you would expect, they get increasingly complicated as the game moves on. While none of them are seriously brain twisters, they are again, some tedious method of justifying why you are in this room in the first place and honestly, if we are looking at how some sort of space station would be created, they are completely stupid. I mean, nobody would design a power scheme like this and it is introduced just so we can have something to solve before moving on. I'm not going to call it lazy because they had to do something but I don't like that this same situation is repeated over and over again. They could have come up with some other sort of puzzle, couldn't they?

I found myself getting frustrated because I couldn't figure out one of these beam puzzles and then just looked it up on YouTube. When I saw the answer I thought to myself, "well that is friggin dumb!" and then only played for a little bit longer because I was faced with yet another beam puzzle less than 15 minutes later.

I really enjoy the story in this game but after a while I found myself just going through the motions doing tedious puzzles followed by unnecessary climbing sequences just to see the next part of the story. None of this is particularly challenging and I'm at the point now where I would rather just watch a playthrough on Twitch or YouTube rather than play the game myself and to me, this is not good when a game ends up going down that road.

Now before you start to think that I am saying for people to stay away from this game just know that I am not. The story and voice acting is exceptionally good in this game but I think that what happened here was that they had a fantastic story but just didn't have any great ideas as to how they could turn it into a game. This isn't really much of a game so much as it is a series of rather boring things that you have to do in order to activate the next chapter of the overall (again, quite good) story that is contained inside.

src
_{I genuinely want to know how this story plays out in this game but probably not enough to actually endure playing it}

This game is decent, but I certainly wouldn't suggest anyone should spend any money on it. It is available for free as part of your Playstation Plus Extra membership and it could be worth checking out for people who want a truly casual gaming experience. That is me being kind and saying those words rather than calling it "boring."