Adult Swim Games and Mediatonic have soft launched a new trial-racing game to the App Store in Canada and other territories: Outlaw Delivery. So, I strapped on my helmet and put some curds and gravy on fries for this edition of It Came From Canada!
Outlaw Delivery takes after titles like Trials, Extreme Road Trip, and Zombie Road Trip as a physics-centered trial-racing game where players must try to make it to the end as quickly as possible, but also in one piece. Players' health is regulated by the health of their cargo: rough landings and hard collisions will damage the cargo, and that's not gonna be good for anyone. Especially so if trying to get the gears, the game's star system. One requires players to stay above a certain health percentage, and three gold gears usually requires both a fast time and high health.
Controls are simple: there are gas and reverse buttons, which serve as spin forward and backward buttons respectively, while in mid-air. Players get extra gold for tricks like spins (which are very difficult to do), wheelies, perfect landings, and even just getting air time in the first place. Players have a limited amount of fuel to work with, though more can be collected mid-level, and just letting gravity and momentum keep oneself going is an option to conserve fuel.
As far as monetization goes, the game uses only one currency - gold - which is spent on buying new bikes, upgrades, and better parts. There's no secondary currency, and no energy mechanic at all, which is very good because there's a lot of retrying involved, and grinding to do better and get more money plays a significant part in the game. It's a lot quicker to just buy it outright of course, but hey, at least the option is there to try and earn it. While Adult Swim Games has been unafraid to use energy-type systems before, like in Amateur Surgeon 3 (though that only reduced players' lives when they die), this is definitely a much friendlier system than what most publishers implement. Of course, friendliness and free-to-play don't often mix, so whether this makes any money is a good question.
Outlaw Delivery should at least prove to be rather entertaining: it trods well-worn territory, but it has the production values and the base appeal that most Adult Swim Games' titles have. This should be one worth keeping an eye on when it launches worldwide.
