I don’t think I’ve ever played a 3D third-person game where I took immediate issue with the camera before. A Pizza Delivery doesn’t seem to have official controller support, but the camera is completely broken and unusable on controllers, all the same. Unfortunately, the camera is the worst I’ve ever seen when using a mouse, too. This, understandably, didn’t give me the best first impression of the game. It kind of looks and feels like a student project that would have received an F for the controls alone, even if it has some good ideas buried under the awful controls and pretentious storytelling.
A Pizza Delivery has you play as a character only known as B. Her character model and all the other character models are incredibly cheap and off-looking, which doesn’t help matters. B works for Earl’s Pizza and has been tasked with delivering a pizza in a green box alongside a pizza in a red box whose pieces can be shared with the three people B meets prior to reaching her destination. The story seems to be set in some kind of purgatory where you’re helping souls move on (while also being a lost soul yourself), but it’s fairly unclear and doesn’t really handle much of this with anything compelling to say.
To get to the end, you must take B through several zones, opening the path forward so that she can make it through on her bike. The controls on foot are semi-poor, but nothing out of the ordinary. When it comes to control of the bike, it’s horrid. You have to hold the W key to accelerate, and the thing manoeuvres like the world’s worst boat. I was constantly slamming it into things, and it was thoroughly unpleasant. But the aforementioned camera is the real issue. No matter the sensitivity selected, it just didn’t feel right at all. It kind of reminded me of cameras in Nintendo 64 games that had to be moved using the C buttons, but it’s even worse than that implies.
I can’t overstate just how truly terrible the camera is. I didn’t even know it was possible to screw a camera up this badly, especially considering the game was made with a common engine. It’s like if someone made a pizza and put water in place of the sauce and lettuce in place of the cheese. The camera is so bad that it gave me a migraine, which is incredibly unusual for a game like this. While I’d imagine people might label it as a “walking simulator,” it’s got exploration and some puzzles here and there. In the first area, you have to find a lever to drain water to move your bike through. In the next, you can find a password to unlock a door and locate an item that requires you to solve a puzzle to open another.
Giving slices of pizza to two of the folks you meet also requires some puzzling, as it’s raining in these areas and you’re not allowed to get the pizza box wet. As such, actually giving these characters pizza is troublesome, especially the last character, who requires you to move your pizza via a conveyor belt. The conveyor belt appeared to be covered, but the rain still got it wet, forcing me to restart the section. I’m not sure if this was a bug or not, so it might actually be impossible to get through here with the pizza.
There are also notes from another character and various objects to find, including eight music boxes that act as the primary collectable. All of this is optional, as you really only need to make it through to progress. The exploration itself is fine for what it is, and there are actually some really lovely vistas in A Pizza Delivery despite how poor some aspects of the game’s graphics are. The best of these has you overlooking an area overpowered by the sunset as you gaze upon windmills in the distance, which is one of the few parts of the game I enjoyed. One zone has a fairly pretty rendition of the Northern Lights in it, too.
Then there’s the snow area. Right before the end, B finds herself trudging through a blizzard and going the wrong way resets her position. This isn’t well-conveyed, and I think part of the problem I had was that the payphone that was blinking in the second section wouldn’t let me answer it, while the previous one told me which direction to go. I’ll chalk that up as another bug. But the absolute worst part came when B fell down in the snow and the game told me to press seven buttons for her to press onward, five of which were on the keyboard. However, the game doesn’t tell you that you also need to hit the W key to actually move.
The issue here should be obvious to any human being, as the game requires you to use all five of your fingers on your left hand but also move a finger that’s currently in use onto the W key. Perhaps the point is that it’s a struggle and it’s meant to make you feel B’s pain, but it’s one of the worst choices I’ve ever seen a game make. The fact that it doesn’t even tell you to press W is really the cherry on top. I can’t imagine what made this seem like a good idea to anyone, but it made a game that already had too many control issues become even more unacceptable. Maybe the dev has an extra finger?
On the bright side, A Pizza Delivery only takes an hour to an hour-and-a-half to beat, so at least it isn’t beating you over the head with terrible controls and vagaries for an extended period of time. If this is indeed a game made by a student for a class, and you’re the professor grading it, I’m sure you already have your red pen ready. If you’re anyone else, you probably shouldn’t consider spending money on this, lest you suffer from its issues as I did.
A Pizza Delivery: Actually delivering pizzas on a moped absolutely sounds like a better time than playing this one. – Andrew Farrell
Consider checking out our previous review:
Once Upon a Katamari PC review — Rolling from the grave |
