yearlong

Look, it’s time to face reality: it’ll be another year until you can play Grand Theft Auto 6. I know, I know — you were probably hoping that you’d wake up this week and discover that its delay to May 26, 2026 was just a dream. Sadly, them’s the breaks, kid. You’re going to need to play some other things to fill that gap, whether its something like Mafia: The Old Country or other vehicular crime games like Mario Kart World (at least the way I plan to play it).

But don’t worry, I’m not just here to bum you out. I am nothing if not constructive, so I come bearing a recommendation to help ease your sorrow, if only for a few weeks. Deliver at All Costs is a delightfully chaotic new game that takes inspiration from the original Grand Theft Auto games, back when the series had a top-down perspective. It’s a compact slice of open-world mayhem that GTA fans are sure to get a kick out of.

Published by Konami, Deliver at All Costs follows a delivery driver named Winston who gets a new gig in the quiet town of St. Monique circa 1959. His job is simple: deliver packages around town in his crappy pick up truck. How hard can that be?

To answer that question, Deliver at All Costs begins with one heck of a joke. At the very start of the game, I exit my apartment and get into my car. I instinctively press down my right trigger to accelerate. Instead of moving forward, my car blasts backwards and crashes through a storefront that crumbles into a million pieces. It’s a perfect introduction. It not only tells me that every piece of the city is destructible, but also that I’m in for a full slapstick comedy of errors.

That’s what the full game delivers over the course of its varied jobs, each of which plays with physics in creative ways. In one mission, I need to haul a living Marlin across town. It thrashes in the backseat of my truck, throwing off my steering. Another mission has me delivering a balloon inflating machine, one that keeps lifting my truck into the air anytime my wheels even slightly come off the ground. All of that happens from a top down perspective that pulls inspiration from Grand Theft Auto 2.

Konami

A game like this lives and dies by how many ways it can twist a simple idea around. While its frontloaded with its best jokes, there are a lot of comedic gags throughout that keep missions diverse. One highlight tasks me with racing toy cars to kids around a neighborhood, piloting them almost like unwieldy slot cars. The cops take notice and deploy a squad of tiny police cars after me, which try to ram into my vehicles and blow them up. I didn’t know what to expect next from each mission, which kept me playing even when its dull story and traditional open-world collect-a-thon hooks didn’t hold my interest.

The real appeal, though, is more primal. The fully destructible maps are just a delight to crash into. For the most part, I tried to do my job like a good upstanding citizen, obeying traffic laws as best as possible. Naturally, that’s not always possible. I’d often find myself barreling through a building and watching bits and pieces fly out of it as I accelerated through the other side. The citizens of its explorable spaces don’t take kindly to being plowed over either, as they’ll attack my truck and force me to get out and repair it. Fortunately, I can craft upgrades to help me deal with that, like hydraulic doors that I can use to knock away pesky pedestrians. It all makes for some satisfying emergent comedy as I turn quiet 1950s towns into my own personal demotion derby.

While it feels a little long in the tooth for what it is and uses its best ideas too fast, Deliver at All Costs is a fun little gem in the vein of something like Maneater. That is to say that it delivers a light, fun, and funny premise and executes it well enough to make it all worth the curiosity. And hey, what else are you going to do for the next year while you wait for Grand Theft Auto 6? Get behind the wheel and deliver some chaos.

Deliver at All Costs launches on May 22 for PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC.

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