Easy Delivery Co

Easy Delivery Co was one of those games that I saw a clip of on twitter and went “woah I want to play this”. Unfortunately I’ve lost the link, but there was some crazy/whacky physics involved with driving on the wall paired with eurobeat. I tried the demo out, felt that the core of the game was fun, wishlisted, and waited for it to come out.

Funnily enough it came out along with like… five other games that I wanted to play. What’s with game developers releasing all their games at this time huh?

Anyways, I finished it today and I enjoyed it! I think it’s only been two days since it came out but it was basically one of those games that was super easy to pick up and play, especially while watching a stream or listening to a podcast. The core loop of the game is pretty straightforward, you pick up deliveries, you drive them to their destination, you manage some resources like fuel and energy, rinse and repeat. There are some main goals you work your way up to and the draw of the game is talking to all the city dwellers and figuring out the mystery.

The city dwellers are all pretty charming in their own right, and there’s a lot of fun snippets of dialogue when you go into their stores picking up deliveries or buying various knick knacks. I found them to be rather charming, though they’re a bit one note, which for the purpose of the game’s setting works fine.

Also the driving was fun! It’s a bit arcadey with the physics and you can indeed do some crazy things (as well as go really fast), but one small snippet that I found myself really enjoying was the first person animation when you’re driving. It’s going to sound weird but I really liked the way the hands moved on the steering wheel when turning, it felt very realistic despite being floating detached polygon hands. Driving around with the packages in the back and finding shortcuts and ways to get to places quicker without dropping them was also entertaining.

The music and art direction was also really good. I liked how you could change through the radio stations to get different moods of music, and the songs themselves were all really good too! I particularly liked the more relaxed songs, which despite the fact that I was driving very fast, felt like it fit the somber mood of the three towns you drive through.

There’s also a lot of mystery elements to the game beyond just the main story. I haven’t delved too deep into them but there seemed like there were a couple of things that had more to them than just what was there on the surface. I may go back and check them out but it’s also possible I’ll leave it up to the more experienced mystery solvers.

Along with the good though there were a feeeew small gripes I had with the game. One super super minor gripe is that when you’re buying something from the shop keepers, they repeat the same dialogue as if you weren’t buying anything. I usually enter a shop, talk to the shop keeper, then buy something. This of course meant I reread the same lines of dialogue… multiple times. Despite me telling myself not to. Personally speaking I think it would make sense to just have the purchase dialogue be separate from the actual dialogue. The map having the store names or some legend with the stores would’ve been nice too, at least for situations where I wanted to visit specific shopkeepers but didn’t have a delivery.

Also while I did like the first person view, I wish there were more elements to the car’s mechanics itself. Something like a fuel gauge and radio station display on the dash or something like that (though if I missed that, that’s entirely on me and I’ll accept it). I additionally felt that there maybe could’ve been more offroad driving shortcuts, but I also accept the fact that maybe I just missed them.

At the end of the day though, I had a lot of fun with the game and I don’t regret it. What I especially liked is that the game had a good pace, in that it never felt like the deliveries near the end of the game got super grindy or annoying. The maps were sized in a way where it felt like you could learn the twists and turns (with helpful signs) without having to constantly refer to the map either. Of course because of the way jobs worked you could totally take more if you wanted, and figuring out optimal routes was part of the fun. Here’s hoping the other games I was looking forward to are just as good or better! …though there’s one that currently has mixed reviews so I’ll see about that one later.