Totally Reliable Delivery Service Review

There is a category of video games that I believe are made specifically to be played by Youtubers, Twitch streamers, and anyone else who plays for an audience. The main focus of these games is creating preposterous, hilarious scenarios that you can share with friends and viewers through a physics engine that is almost accurate to real life. The first game of this genre that I’m aware of is Surgeon Simulator, a game about trying to do surgery by controlling each individual finger of a surgeon. Since then, other games have come along including Goat Simulator, I Am Bread, Octodad: The Dadliest Catch, and Totally Accurate Battle Simulator. Normally I don’t have much interest in these kinds of games, but most of the games I’ve reviewed so far this year have been slower, more serious games so when I saw Totally Reliable Delivery Service came out last week, I thought it would be a good change of pace.

Totally Reliable Delivery Service is a game about goofy, overweight shipping and delivery workers attempting to deliver unusual packages while overcoming poor limb control and laws of physics that want to make the lives of every delivery worker miserable. When playing, players have very limited control over their delivery worker, only able to move, grab with their hands, and raise their arms. With these limited controls, players have to struggle against a purposefully tricky physics engine. Walking up even the slightest incline is like climbing Everest, cars tip over when turning if driven faster than a jogging cow, and anything remotely combustible will detonate when touched by anything more forceful than a silk cloth. Totally Reliable Delivery Service doesn’t do these things to frustrate the player, but instead to enable ridiculous chains of events, such as players purposefully colliding with an oil barrel while turning a corner in a truck to propel the truck over a river and into a sports stadium to complete their delivery. At least, that’s the pitch.

Paradoxically, the greatest strength of Totally Reliable Delivery Service is also its most noteworthy shortcoming, and that’s the strange physics engine. There were plenty of times where a nonsensical interaction would lead to a funny moment for me and the friend I was playing with. My favorite moment was when we were driving to a delivery in a weird three-wheeled flatbed cart, my friend standing in the back with the package as I drove. As we neared the destination, I lost control of the vehicle due to an exploding fire extinguisher and it veered hard to one side. But thanks to a mix of weird physics and my friend’s reflexes, he was hurled out of the back of the cart and directly into the delivery box. I don’t think we could’ve done anything cooler if we’d planned it and it had us laughing for five solid minutes afterwards. Unfortunately, for every moment of hilarious triumph, we had just as many instances of frustration where we were fighting the game itself just to get anything done. I lost track of how many times we failed deliveries because some fluke in the physics coding caused a package of fireworks to suddenly explode because it touched the side of the delivery vehicle in just the wrong way. It almost feels like a coin flip, whether any given delivery will be fun or infuriating, and I’d definitely like more of a guarantee of entertainment out of games I play.

Though the deliveries are obviously the main focus of Totally Reliable Delivery Service, the game has a few other features to keep players entertained. The most prominent of these is the surprising amount of unlockable customization options and vehicles. When players start the game, they’re able to customize their delivery worker in a number of ways, including skin tone, hair style, and clothing. There are at least a dozen options for each facet of the character, but as the player completes deliveries, more will be unlocked, allowing for more expressive, and often more ridiculous, characters to be made, which certainly helps the nonsensical atmosphere of the game. Players also earn access to personal vehicles as they complete more deliveries, allowing them to always have a preferred vehicle on hand for any delivery, which helps keep the game feeling doable by letting players use the vehicles they’re adept with. Lastly, players earn cash by completing deliveries which can be used to apply new paint jobs to their favorite rides. These options don’t go very far to alleviate major problems I had with the core game, but I’m sure anyone who is already having a good time with this game will appreciate the presence of them.

I can’t conclude this review without mentioning the thing I think is most aspirational in Totally Reliable Delivery Service: The open-world structure. Instead of each delivery being its own self-contained level, the deliveries are dispersed across a large area full of buildings, vehicles, and various geological features. This means that as players want to take on new deliveries, they first have to navigate to the dispatch kiosks which can include anything from driving up a mountain to crossing an ocean. Much like the wacky physics engine, I’m divided on this because sometimes this meant I got to discover massive stunt driving structures to do cool jumps off of, but sometimes it meant having to do a considerable amount of backtracking after failing a delivery, which only served to worsen an already bad mood. For as much fun as it was for my friend and I to see a blimp floating through the air and decide we were going to ignore everything else just to get to the blimp, I can’t help but think Totally Reliable Delivery Service might have been better off with distinct levels to allow players to more easily start and restart levels to keep the mood up.

I think there’s genuine fun to be had in Totally Reliable Delivery Service because at its core it’s a huge toy box full of goofy surprises. But this is hampered by the joke that is the physics engine working against the players as often as it works for them. If you’ve got three friends who want to mess around in a silly world, I’d say pick up Totally Reliable Delivery Service but make sure you wait until it’s on sale for less than the $15 base price.

Buy this game on sale

It’s worth playing, just not at the price they’re asking