Deliver Us Mars review – Hit and Miss(ion)

With Bethesda’s galaxy-spanning RPG Starfield finally coming out this year (well, we’re holding thumbs), space games are in the spotlight. During the wait, you may be tempted to play something else extra-terrestrial, and that’s where brand-new sci-fi adventure Deliver Us Mars comes in.

A follow-up to 2018’s Deliver Us the Moon, also made by Dutch developers KeokeN Interactive, Deliver Us Mars is a sober and more realistic-leaning space tale – the type that will likely appeal to fans of hard science fiction like Andy Weir’s The Martian. It’s also textbook sequel material. Deliver Us Mars is bigger, longer and more polished. However, also in typical sequel style, while pushing into fresh territory, it’s stumbled over itself in some very noticeable ways. But more about that later.

For the record, you don’t need to have played Deliver Us the Moon to play Deliver Us Mars. Knowledge of the first game’s plot does flesh out some otherwise sketched backstory involving returning figures, but you are playing a new character here: spunky 19-year-old astronaut Kathy Johanson (performed by Poldark actress Ellise Chappell). Set in 2069, 10 years after the events of Deliver Us the Moon, the Earth is a dying, resource-starved planet ravaged by climate change. As predicted, your protagonist’s efforts in the previous game were just a stop-gap, and the only hope for our world is seeking out the technologically advanced ARK colony ships central to previous events on the moon. Fortunately, a mangled audio transmission suggests that the ARKs, and their scientist crews, weren’t lost in the vastness of space, and have ended up on Mars.

An already daunting task is made more complicated by the fact that one of the colony leaders is Kathy’s father Isaac, a disgraced, but no less brilliant inventor. Oh, and Kathy’s crew includes Sarah Baker, who had her life forever altered by a violent clash with Isaac on the moon; and Kathy’s hard-lining older sister Claire, another Deliver Us returnee, who considers Isaac a traitor to his home world and his daughters when he left both.

Deliver Us Mars is sounding at this point like a very terrestrial and very familiar domestic drama. And yes, the tension between family and selfless responsibility to a greater good is a key narrative driver. That said, Deliver Us Mars, like much of the complex, credible technology we see onscreen, consists of multiple moving parts. While you may occasionally encounter plot holes – and players are denied one particularly painful conversation which you would expect to kick-start a reunion – it’s a contemplative and cinematic game.

Deliver Us Mars routinely presents players with characters and choices that are morally grey, inviting you to consider where you stand on the shifting red sands. It also is unusually unflinching in its depiction of heartbreaking moments. These are played out to maximum emotional effect, and there’s at least one you won’t easily forget. Deliver Us Mars is also notable as one of those rare games, and media in general, that depicts grief and trauma as cyclical. Characters don’t just go through something awful and instantly get over it. In quieter moments they revisit what happened, receiving a fresh slap of anguish. While an explicit timeline of events would have been welcome, the game writing is strong, nuanced, and doesn’t feel the need to clench players’ hands with repeated, overstated explanations.

Deliver Us Mars isn’t a passive visual novel, of course. It’s a sci-fi adventure with puzzle solving, platforming, and a mystery to piece together through found items and decrypted holograms. Helping you is your paired robot assistant AYLA who can unlock security doors, pass through small spaces and, occasionally, retrieve items. The platforming is entirely up to you, though, with the player in control of Kathy’s climbing axes individually. Here again, Deliver Us Mars goes for a more realistic dynamic, as climbing and descending requires a muscle-memory rhythm of alternatingly slamming axes into suitable surfaces, all while keeping a tight grip (translation: tension on the controller triggers) so you don’t fall. The action has a pleasing tangibility missing from the likes of the rebooted Tomb Raider series.

As Deliver Us Mars progresses, the puzzles – which involve connecting, splitting and muffling energy beams – become more complex, although this is the game’s only real cerebral challenge. Instead of deepening its gameplay beyond climbing, linking items to power, and lasering apart obstacles, KeokeN Interactive seems more concerned with ticking off every item on space fans’ Mars adventure wish list. So over the course of a typical 8 to 10 hour playthrough (Deliver Us the Moon clocked in at 5 to 7 hours), you’ll complete a dizzying first-person-perspective EVA in space to complete urgent repairs, race a rover across Mars, line up satellite connections, visit hydroponic biodomes, and bound along the surface of the Red Plant on foot, always time limited to the amount of oxygen in your suit. Probably most thrilling of all, you even man the controls in a step-by-step rocket launch.

With its emphasis on flicking switches and turning dials to match displays, at times Deliver Us Mars feels more like a featherweight sim than anything else. However, if you’re tired of pew-pew combat and other far-fetched space shenanigans in games, man, does Deliver Us Mars deliver the satisfying goods for armchair astrophiles.

Deliver Us Mars gets so much right that it’s a pity that it gets one key thing so horribly, horribly wrong. This one thing continually undermines everything else on the screen – and it’s the character models, which are stiff, awkward and just plain ugly. I feel guilty dumping on an indie game for its visuals, but if you attempted to date Deliver Us Mars based solely on its models, you’d think it was made circa 2010.

To be fair, these gripes are less applicable to leading lady Kathy, who players spend the most time with. Also, as the game progresses, Kathy is more frequently alone, bar for AYLA floating at her side. However, when Sarah, Claire and co. are in frame, they’re a distraction with their odd combination of outsized Punch and Judy features and plastic, sagging skin which makes them look decades older than their stated age. Out of interest, Deliver Us the Moon got around this problem by always keeping your character helmeted, and limiting other figures to faceless holograms out of the past.

It’s just ultimately so disappointing that the characters of Deliver Us Mars exist as such a jarring contrast to the game’s convincing and intricately designed world, which is truly stunning thanks to its Unreal Engine-enabled ray traced shadows and reflections. Barring some niggles, Deliver Us Mars offers players an engrossing extra-terrestrial adventure, but it’s a near-constant struggle to look past its off-putting character exteriors and let yourself get fully immersed in its affecting tale.

Deliver Us Mars is out now for PC (Steam, Epic Games Store), Xbox One and Series consoles, and PS4 and PS5.