Deliver Us Mars Review (PS5)

Deliver Us Mars is set ten years after the events of Deliver Us the Moon and this time, as the title of the game suggests, you will travel to our neighboring planet. You play as a young astronaut, Kathy Johanson, who is part of a team tasked with traveling to Mars to retrieve vital technology in hopes of saving the dying Earth.

If you’ve played the original game, many of the characters you’ll encounter will be familiar to you. While you can play this as a standalone title, you’ll get a lot more out of it and have a much better understanding of your team’s history and motivations if you play Deliver Us the Moon first.

This time around, the story has a much more personal and intimate feel. While there’s still the backdrop to your mission to save Earth, it’s more the relationships between the various characters that will keep you wanting to move on and discover more. There are absolutely fantastic performances from many of the voice actors that really help to enhance some of the emotional moments you’ll encounter.

Kathy is not only trying to find technology to help save our home planet, but also finding out what happened to the colonists of Mars, including her father. As you explore, you’ll better understand what’s going on by finding various collectibles. These come in the form of holograms, text messages, and notes between settlers, which will start to fill in some of the blanks. You’re only given a little bit of information at a time, but it’s still just enough to make you want to keep going and find the next clue. What makes things really fascinating is that the majority of the characters you meet are morally ambiguous. You’ll really start to wonder if what you and your team are doing is the “right” thing to do.

From time to time, you will come across various puzzles that will stand in your way. Things like locked doors where you’ll have to position energy beams to open them, or decryption puzzles that have you moving your little flying robot friend Ayla. These puzzles start out simple but get more complex as you progress through the game. is never slowed down. You’ll be constantly pushing forward trying to figure out the next piece of the story.

Climbing is one of the big new features in the game. Kathy is much more agile than the original astronaut and can climb using her ice picks to ascend surfaces on Mars or along insulator fabric inside the space station. You’ll control each arm separately, manually repositioning each pick, then using the L2 and R2 triggers to ram your picks into the wall to climb. It feels neat at first and it’s easy to get into a rhythm of alternating between triggers, but it quickly gets tiresome.

There’s a reason most games automatically let your character climb. Having to do it manually is not only slow, it also tires your fingers. There are some accessibility options, like only having to use one of the triggers, but you’ll be constantly holding it down, so none of the options will really help you. It can also be quite finicky whenever you have to jump over gaps to the next climbable section, and more often than not you’ll end up throwing yourself in the wrong direction to your untimely death.

There are a number of different environments you can explore, not just the red sands of Mars but also a space station, an icy valley, as well as a few scenes on Earth. There is certainly something very beautiful and serene about driving a space rover through the desolate landscape, or peering through a porthole into the depths of the cosmos. It’s a bit of a shame, then, that Earth is less visually impressive. The setting tends to be used for flashbacks that tell Kathy’s story, but they lose some of their emotional impact due to the slow frame rate and frequent pop-ins, which is much less noticeable everywhere else in the game.

Unfortunately, we encountered a few bugs during our six to eight hour playthrough, things like the inability to interact with the mechanisms needed to open doors. For the most part, the game’s frequent autosave means a quick reload never gets you too far. However, we ran into an annoying situation where the game auto-saved us right in front of a spinning death fan, meaning we were locked in a reload cycle to instant death. The only way we managed to fix this was to restart the chapter completely.

Many of these issues are fairly minor, however, and that doesn’t stop Deliver Us Mars from being a brilliantly engrossing adventure. Sure, the puzzles are simple enough, but there are enough epic settings, intriguing collectibles, twists, and a wonderfully atmospheric soundtrack to keep you fully invested in Kathy’s journey to the end. Developer KeokeN Interactive has definitely built on the successes of the first game to create another harrowing storyline that will hold your attention throughout its runtime.

Conclusion

Deliver Us Mars has a gripping sci-fi story that will have you thinking long after the credits roll. There are a few small quirks, like an annoying escalation mechanic and framerate drops on Earth, but with fantastic voice acting, it’s easy to get really invested in the characters and the fate of humanity. The simple puzzles do a good job of giving your brain a bit of a workout while never being so taxing that they slow down the pace of the action. Overall, this is a great follow-up that delivers a compelling sci-fi tale.