Death Delivery

In the post-Hotline Miami world, there aren't exactly a huge number of games whose sole gameplay purpose is to score points by committing violence. 

That’s what makes it all the more interesting that such a game has come to us from Georgia. (Not to be confused with the US state of Georgia). 

And since we’ve brought up Hotline Miami, I’ll use it as a kind of reference point for comparison, because not a whole lot of information has been gathered about Death Delivery specifically. 

I’d like to talk about the story, buuut… What story? Forget that word. This game has no story. The only story is the trail of corpses the player leaves behind. Don’t expect any narcotic, schizoid trips where people with animal heads will lecture you about violence and your predatory nature. No cutscenes, no dialogue. Nothing. 

The graphics, to be perfectly honest, are not this game’s strong suit. The textures are flat, the levels are simple. I’d even say that sometimes the level design made me think we were in some kind of simulation, because the surrounding scenery in its layout usually makes no sense whatsoever. Just a set of rooms sitting in the middle of absolute nothingness, inside a skybox that resembles the pictures usually used as backgrounds for retrowave music compilations. 

Well, at least the enemy and weapon models are far from the worst. 

Although, in fact, there are only 3 types of enemies in the game: 

1. 1) Dudes in black suits with melee weapons
2. 2) Dudes in white suits with firearms
3. 3) Tough dudes in black suits with melee weapons. 

Now, what I definitely noticed were the animations. The only truly good animations in the game are the execution animations. Bloody and brutal. The rest of the animations can’t boast much beauty. Enemies with firearms look like stationary turrets, and enemies with melee weapons look like stiff mannequins. 

And for that matter, we don’t have time to scrutinize all this when we’re speeding through the levels like the wind. 

The music in the game is not bad. Not on the level of Perturbator, of course, but it does its job of pumping the player full of adrenaline for non-stop combat. 

And finally: The Gameplay. 

Here everything is extremely simple. Before starting a level, we choose the difficulty (either Easy, with more HP and auto-aim for firearms, or Hard, where HP is lower, auto-aim is absent, but we get more points). 

We also choose the weapon we’ll start the level with. The selection isn’t huge, but it’s enough. There’s a pistol, SMG, shotgun, rifle, assault rifle, knife, baseball bat, etc. 

And finally, we choose a motorcycle helmet. Why? Because each one gives us certain abilities: more HP, more speed, more damage, all that sort of thing. The better we play, the more become available. 

After we’ve made our choices, we appear next to our motorcycle and begin the carnage. 

We speed through the level, trying to maintain our combo. 

Helping us with this are: slow-motion, a rage meter, and executions. 

All of the above increase the number of points earned, especially if used in tandem with each other. 

By the way, enemies have a health bar (incidentally, so do we, which allows for mistakes, unlike, say, Hotline Miami). 

And this element, in my opinion, slightly spoils and slows down the gameplay, because even headshots don’t always guarantee an enemy’s death. 

After taking a certain amount of damage, an enemy can enter a disoriented state and will just stand there until you finish the job. And that, essentially, is the entirety of the gameplay. 

From fight to fight, the tactics are roughly the same. You prioritize either enemies with firearms or those closest to you. You use slow-mo and rage as the situation demands. 

Functionally, melee weapons are identical and only differ in appearance and damage. 

At least firearms differ in their firing mode. 

And it would all be fine, but the game has ONLY 5 levels, which unlock as you achieve a B rank. There’s also one more arena with a survival mode, but that’s not enough. Don’t get me wrong, simple gameplay can certainly keep a player engaged, but 5 levels is very few. I played for just over two hours, getting an S rank on all levels. This project feels more like a tech demo than a full game. It IS in an Early Access program, but the last update was 3 month ago at the time of writing this, sooooo....

The price is low, so it’s up to you to decide if you want to invest in a product that might or might not bloom into something amazing.