Totally Reliable Delivery Service Review: Comical Approach Keeps Things Light

One of the first things they taught us in film studies was to take each movie on its own terms. You can't expect "The Godfather" from "Meet the Fockers," but you also shouldn't. Where one aims to teach you something about what it means to be a human in a complicated world, about the messy intersection of family, duty, greed, and violence, the other is just trying to make you laugh. To judge its failure to do anything more is to judge a fish for being unable to fly.

Totally Reliable Delivery Service, developed by We're Five Games and published by tinyBuild, falls firmly (flatly?) into the latter camp. It uses just about every weapon in its arsenal in pursuit of that laugh, and it succeeds a great deal more than "Meet the Fockers," if we're keeping score.

Totally Reliable Delivery Service Review: Comical Approach Keeps Things Light

TRDS is a floppy, physics-based delivery sim in the vein of the aforementioned Human Fall Flat and Gang Beasts. Players drop into a colorful, if low-detail world as pudgy delivery men and women, tasked with bringing packages from one location to another. You're given a huge variety of vehicles with which to complete these drop-offs, including golf carts, hot air balloons, helicopters and more. Sometimes there's a time limit, and sometimes the packages are fragile, but the game's difficulty doesn't come from direct challenges like that. Instead, it comes from the loose controls and general incompetence of the player character.

Each shoulder button on a controller (or Q and E on keyboard, though I can't recommend a controller enough) maps to one of your character's arms. The right bumper raises the right arm, and the right trigger causes it to clamp down on whatever's nearest. Sometimes that's the package you're meant to deliver, and sometimes it's the shoulder of your teammate, who you are now lifting over your head and, yep, there they go sailing into the river, swearing the whole way down.

Because if you're not playing with friends, you're hardly playing TRDS. The game relies so heavily on the chaos caused by its wonky physics for humor that it calls out to be shared. I first played the game on my own, and it earned a few quiet chuckles over the course of that time. But as soon as I brought in some fellow delivery people, which players can do locally or online, all of us were laughing our asses off.

Once you have an audience, glitching into buildings and vehicles becomes at least twice as funny, and We're Five knows it. You'll frequently find yourself stuffed bodily into the lift of your forklift, or swallowed up by a dropbox during a successful delivery, but you'll have plenty of ways to get out. Spamming the jump button will often work to jiggle you free (and speaking of jiggling — the butts on these characters border on obscene), but if that doesn't work you can head into the pause menu and respawn at any time. It turns what would otherwise be frustrating into painless humor.

The game sets you up with dozens of delivery missions to explore. Success is measured through bronze, silver and gold medals, each of which comes with a cash prize you can use to customize the in-game vehicles. Those help you navigate an impressively large game world. You'll drive the streets of a city, sled down mountains, and get launched by a desert island tornado before you've seen it all.

That variety of locale is one of the game's top assets, as after a while the conceit starts to wear thin. You can only topple helplessly from a speeding car so many times before fatigue sets in. Even with friends in tow, I could only complete a few of the challenges presented in each area before moving on to the next, leaving many of the deliveries unfinished.

The game also has its mechanical shortcomings. If the player is flying from island to island and happens to fall from their vehicle, they have no choice in where they respawn. This can lead to some friction when rendezvousing with a friend a few islands over. While there are workarounds, it still sucks to occasionally find oneself marooned on an island.

There's a lot to love about Totally Reliable Delivery Service. If you're looking for a few laughs, it lives up to its name. Anything more than that? You might want to take your business elsewhere.

Totally Reliable Delivery Service is available on the iOS, Google Play, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, and the Epic Games Store, where it is free for its first week.