Parcel Corps – PS5 Review

From Belfast based developer Billy Goat and publisher Secret Mode comes Parcel Corps, best described as an amalgam of two classic Sega games of the Dreamcast era. The games being Crazy Taxi and Jet Set Radio. You play as a bicycle courier in a cel shaded world with a similar vibe to the latter and a game structure not unlike the former. This is quite the departure from Billy Goat’s prior release Her Majesty’s Spiffing, a daft adventure this reviewer played back in early 2018 when we still played Xbox and cared about achievements.

Though rather than passengers your cargo is, obviously, packages. In effect you’re an Uber Eats or Deliveroo rider operating on behalf of a faceless delivery company as a self-employed contractor. In what is no doubt a nod to the pitiful money that those in the gig economy make, you’ll not see much of the proceeds that businesses pay for your services.

At the outset in each area, you’ll have zero businesses to make deliveries on behalf of, your first task being to gain their trust. Only then will they be available to work for via your delivery app.

To unlock respective businesses, you’ll need to carry out an initial task, be it a checkpoint race, bill sticking adverts around place or in one particularly onerous task we kept failing, you have to string together a bunch of tricks to reach high up and smash drones. This is fine, but after a while you’ll often realise you’re going to come up short well ahead of the often tight deadlines you operate under. Yes, you can quit out but you’ll be left to it right where you stopped. If you fail, you can retry almost immediately as you’re dropped off where you started out. But there’s no restart option.

This isn’t helped by not being able to necessarily find the start point again, as the second level set in a cathedral city that has shades of London is particularly labyrinthine for example. This in conjunction with the aforementioned deadlines can make for some tough sledding.

Despite this though, Parcel Corps is generally fun enough and the caricatures of each of the respective courier locations are well done, if a little overwrought. For example, the pizza delivery guy is short, Italian and moustachioed. Or the gym gainz type is a musclebound minotaur thing.

Subsequent storeholders lapse either into borderline bodyhorror; for example the half man half doughnut is the stuff of nightmares; or more stereotypes. The references to real life businesses are also fun, IDEA for flat pack furniture for example or BRB for cycle parts, the latter being well known in Ireland at least.

One thing we noticed; particularly in the parklands area you start the proper in; is that while the marker sends you in roughly the right direction, there’s no accounting for vertical elevation. This is acutely felt when you’re close to beating the clock and successfully making a delivery, only to find yourself on the wrong level. Or in one egregious case, on the wrong side of an impenetrable barrier.

What’d be useful, is for your onscreen marker to show up at all times like in one of the classic Sega games that Parcel Corps seeks to ape, in this case, Crazy Taxi. That had a big polygonal arrow showing at all times, to no real detriment to gameplay. The onscreen marker to your next objective only shows up when you are facing directly in that direction, and then it’s only a small white target marker.

As you progress you’ll be given multiple drop deliveries or deliveries where you have to string together a flurry of tricks prior to making the delivery itself. We failed a delivery a few times before we twigged that was the criteria. It wasn’t exactly well communicated at the beginning of the quests. You get a little marker showing your progress, which is all well and good, but until you’ve failed a few times, you won’t realise you have the additional wrinkle.

Your mobile phone is your gateway to your next job among many other things. You’ll become as dependent on it as many have become on their own fondleslabs, though navigating it is surprisingly fiddly for reasons we’ll go into. Navigating it is done via the right stick, rather than with the left which is massively counterintuitive given it shows up left of your screen.

We get this is so you can simultaneously control your bike and use your phone at the same time, but practically you’ll end up distracted and lose control like any number of irresponsible dickheads on the motorway. Our most recent encounter having an animated Facetime call doing sixty-five on the M4 in heavy fog at night, complete with hand movements, as opposed to actually controlling their vehicle.

Oh, talking of heavy fog, once it clears up, why do so many knobheads leave their foglights on after the need to use them has long since passed? Just turn them off already.

Getting back to it, to increase your general reputation in each area and progress the main campaign, you have to participate in what’s penned a delivery rush. This is a bit like arcade mode in Crazy Taxi where you have to string together a bunch of deliveries, though it’s not quite as fluid. Once you’ve hit level three in a zone, you can move on to the next area. You don’t have to do it all in one hit either, it can be done over several delivery rushes until you hit the earnings cap and next rep tier.

As well as deliveries, you’ll be asked to take part in segment challenges, in effect point to point time trials. Again though, the navigation aspect undermines this somewhat, as despite being set a challenge to do one by a tubby MAMIL; that being a middle aged man in lycra; we’ve yet to retrace our steps sufficiently to be able to revisit the challenge and see it through. There is also a real-time ticker a bit like a Twitch live-stream chat that gives you real time feedback on how gnarly your current chain of stunts is.

The thing is, other than the occasional live challenges you’re set by your apparent viewers and the deliveries that have the stunt requirement, you can largely get away without doing any stunts. As long as you’re quick, Parcel Corps doesn’t insist you do so outside the stipulated moments we mention. Yes, it might be boring and not exactly stylish, but it is possible.

You can upgrade your bicycle via your phone, though the changes are purely cosmetic. Unless we’ve missed something, this is the only use of your earnings in the game. These parts can be applied in the internet café that also serves as a way to enter multiplayer games. As well as that, you can play a shoot-em-up via an arcade game cabinet, but sadly not the pool tables that are also in the same building. Heck, we’d play them too. Talking of downtime, there’s also a take on the classic Nokia phone timewaster Snake, in this case Snake Path.

A little like Jet Set Radio, you’ll soon draw the attention of law enforcement, starting with basic police, escalating to heavy weapons units and attack helicopters. To begin with they loiter, but after a while they get more aggressive. Another JSR similarity is felt with regard to the excellent music. It’s dead catchy, though not quite up there with the likes of Guitar Vader or Hideki Naganuma’s work in Sega’s classic.

Oddly, despite Parcel Corps not being massively engaging or particularly sticky in terms of encouraging retrying some of the more difficult challenges, it is somehow fun. It didn’t make us want to go and play it particularly, due in some part to our genuinely needing to get glasses, nor did it make us switch on our PS5 with a view to playing it.

Though when we switched on to check whether a gripe of ours had been resolved by the steady trickle of patches since release; it hadn’t; we found ourselves idly having fun just messing around, if not actually progressing. We expect we’ll continue to play, just on and off. We think that is the best way to play Parcel Corps, in short bursts, rather than for extended periods.

In conclusion, while Parcel Corps is by no means essential and doesn’t lend itself particularly well to extended periods, it is a fun place to mess around in. Though we suspect, not quite in the manner that Billy Goat had in mind.