When ‘Deliver Us the Moon’ was released on Xbox in 2020 it came out at the perfect time, now we have the next game Deliver Us Mars. We were in lockdown and I was drastically running out of things to keep me entertained. Then I stumbled across this indie space game by ‘KeokeN Interactive’ which I hadn’t realised had already been out for 2 years for PC.
I must have been living under a rock.
From start to finish I completely fell in love with ‘Deliver us the moon’. The fact that I’ve played it through a total of 6 times can back this up.
I was hooked on the story of Earth becoming less habitable and becoming solely dependent on the Moon’s constant supply of Helium 3 for power. The game drew me into its mystery by having the player as the only physical character throughout the entire story. You learn what happened on Pearson Station and the Moonhub through data files and playable holograms. The exposition speaks for itself.
‘Deliver us the Moon’ earned its place on my all-time favourites list for all of these aspects. Yes, it wasn’t an AAA+ game but you could really tell that the developers cared and poured their love into it.
I was left wondering when I finished my first playthrough ‘Would there be a follow-up?’. For a story as great as this I thought it would be a damn shame to pass up on a sequel and expand the story. So when I heard last year that a sequel was coming and that it would be set on Mars I was beyond excited.
I think I should note that I’m obsessed with space and Mars is my favourite planet (besides Earth) in our solar system, so to have a game set on it (and in the world, they have created) made me want to play it as soon as I could.
So let’s leave the orbit of the Moon and set our sights on Mars and dive right in.
If I was to compare ‘Deliver us the Moon’ and ‘Deliver Us Mars’ to specific movies, ‘Deliver us the Moon’ would be ‘Moon’ (2009) with Sam Rockwell and ‘Deliver Us Mars’ would be ‘The Martian’ (2015) with Matt Damon. Not because the settings of these films are identical to the games but because they share similarities in story and scenarios. More on this later.
‘Deliver us Mars’ is set 10 years after the events of ‘Deliver us the Moon’. You play Kathy Johanson who is the sister of Claire Johanson and daughter of Isaac Johanson who you learn about and hear from hologram and audio playbacks while exploring Pearson Station and the Moonhub in the first game.
‘Deliver us Mars’ opens up with a flashback establishing what really happened on the Moon and where Isaac went. You lean through cutscenes that Isaac tried to depart from the Moon with Kathy on board the ‘Outward’ Ark colony ships. However, he was split up from Kathy when his older daughter Claire attempted to stop him from going.
We then zip forward in time and Kathy is working as an MPT engineer for the WSA (World Space Agency). Without giving too much of the story away, the WSA receives contact from the colony ships which are now on Mars. Kathy is desperate to find out what happened to her father so when she is not invited to the meeting in which her sister is involved she decides to eavesdrop. She overhears the message sent from Mars. It’s very scrambled but she can hear it’s her dad’s voice and recognises his pet name for her ‘Moon bear’ (see the moon bear floating in Claire’s room in ‘Deliver us the Moon’). Kathy then storms into the meeting and persuades them to let her be a part of ‘Opera Team’.
We then have another time jump to the day of the mission. Here a great piece of gameplay from the first game comes in which is the launch sequence of the spaceship that will take you to the title destination. Like in the first game you run through all the preparations and sequences to be able to launch the space rocket. Like I said last time it is a wonderful sequence that really makes you feel like an astronaut.
I must note before moving forward that there is a nice call back to the first game at the WSA headquarters where you cut through a museum to get to your destination. In the museum, there is an exhibit of the ‘Fortuna One’ mission and all the astronauts involved.
Moving onto the gameplay.
The gameplay in ‘Deliver us Mars’ is mostly the same as in ‘Deliver us the Moon’. When in areas with gravity the game is in the third person allowing you to see the character model of Kathy, but when you switch to Zero G or in underwater sections the game then shifts to a first-person putting you in the headspace of the character.
While in the Zero-G (and underwater) sections the movement controls also shift to help you adapt and compensate for floating around. The right and left bumpers let you rotate your angle, A and B let you float up and down and the left thumbstick lets you direct your movement. It’s a nice way to move around and once you master it you’ll be having so much fun in Zero-G.
The new gameplay addition is rock climbing. It makes sense as Mars is practically a barren wasteland filled with mountainous terrain, plus it adds a fun element to traversing it. You’re equipped with two climbing axe’s and you use the left and right triggers to operate the respective axes. If you let go of both triggers you will fall, but if you immediately press them both in again Kathy will slam the axes into the rock/ice in front of her to break her fall. It works very similarly to the tomb raider climbing axes.
You’re given a brief tutorial on how to use them in a flashback sequence earlier in the game before landing on Mars. However, this tutorial doesn’t explain how to propel yourself onto a climbable rock/ice face that is directly behind you. I had to google how to do this and after 10 minutes of trial and error I finally (although by a fluke) managed to barely climb up an ice cliff while having to jump from side to side. It was a bit of a let-down as I was stuck scratching my head looking at the wall thinking ‘How the hell am I supposed to climb that’ and not being shown how to do it. I personally think that a more in-depth tutorial or on-screen instructions could have been added here to this to make it more user-friendly. I get that there trying to keep it minimal to keep the immersion, but it breaks it once you’re stuck with a problem you can’t solve.
Another new element is how to access the holograms left throughout Mars. In the first game, it was as simple as pressing the X button to interact and play the sequence. This time around you have a quirky mini-game where you have to perfectly line up three rectangles within a circle. You’ll know you’ve done it correctly once they are all blue. To do this you must take control of your ASE (Droid) and float forward or back, up or down and side to side to get them to align. It was annoying at first, but as the Zero-G controls, once you’ve mastered them you’ll find it easy.
Now I mentioned previously my comparisons to the two films ‘Moon’ and ‘The Martian’.
I’ll explain why.
‘Deliver us the Moon’ is very much like ‘Moon’ (2009) where it’s a very self-contained story featuring only one physical presence. Whereas ‘The Martian’ even though it is a story about a lone man on Mars, it also features a supporting cast to help elevate the story. This is reflected in ‘Deliver us Mars’ as you don’t feature on your own in this game, unlike its predecessor. You have a supporting cast from the crew of ‘Opera Team’ to your sister Claire and your dad Isaac. I think the developers went for this approach as they wanted to tell a more personal character-driven story this time around focused on a father’s undying love for his daughter. And as a father to my little girl, I really connected and related with the story and its characters and could empathise with their goals and motivations. When a story has made that connection with the player and has them invested like that, then the developers have done their job right. So hats off to you ‘KeokeN Interactive’.
Performance wise the game ran smoothly on the Xbox series X with little lag or drops in frame rate. The load times were fast making the loading screens barely a chore and textures would be there immediately. The character models look good too. I can tell more time was taken on making Kathy’s character look perfect and as close to her voice actress Ellise Chappell as possible. However, the other characters face models suffered a little in the process and mainly with the hair and eyebrows. Ryan and Sarah’s characters for example. The eyebrows looked very choppy like someone had taken an electric razor to them in their sleep as a joke. Also, the hair is too shiny and too ‘together’. In Tomb Raider (reboot) they made a big song and dance that each hair on Lara’s head is an individual strand which looked great, whereas this… not so much.
Now I’m not saying it’s bad. Once you get over the initial look you learn to look past it as you’re more focused on the gorgeous locations of Earth, The Moon, The Space Ship and of course Mars and the Arks. I just wish the amount of detail they put into these locations was the same in the character models.
Now I did test the game on an Xbox One S and unfortunately, it does not hold up on older hardware.
Load times are long. The frame rate is inconsistent. Scene freeze momentarily while the sound plays on and you have to wait for the picture to catch up. Textures take longer to pop in and character models look dated.
It’s a shame as people who haven’t been able to get their hands on a next-gen console yet due to the shortage will be playing this game on their ‘Current’ last-gen consoles and won’t be able to experience it at its full potential.
Overall ‘Deliver us Mars’ is a worthy follow-up to the outstanding ‘Deliver us the Moon’. While I don’t see it in the same light yet as its predecessor I’m sure multiple playthroughs to experience Mars again will help to sway my mind.
Yes, the game has its flaws here and there, but we become so wrapped up these days in the graphics and the technical details that the story that the developer is trying to tell gets lost in the echo. ‘Deliver us the Moon’ did such a good job in establishing this world that you become so invested in it and you begin to look past these flaws. Gaming is meant to be fun, and ‘Deliver us Mars’, ‘Delivers’ on just that.
(see what I did there!)
Deliver Us Mars was reviewed on the Xbox Series Set of consoles, grab your copy here https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/deliver-us-mars/9mz33g9gh5pk
Platforms: PlayStation 5, Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X and Series S, Microsoft Windows
Engine: Unreal Engine 4
Developer: KeokeN Interactive
Publisher: Frontier Developments plc
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