Does this Paperman promise more than he can deliver?

Paperman’s post office has managed to make 1 million deliveries. To celebrate this special achievement, the post office has decided to send out special golden letters to their most loyal customers. On a night when the dragon is watching television, he sees the news about the golden letters. Greedy as he is, the dragon uses his ancient magic to attack the post office and steal all the mail including the golden letters to add to the massive mountain of gold he already possesses. Paperman and his team will do everything in their power to retrieve the mail and get it delivered! Meet Paperman and the team in an adventure to find the lost mail and defeat the greedy dragon. Explore colourful worlds, uncover secrets, and collect all golden letters in this 3D collectathon platformer!

Paperman: Adventure Delivered clearly takes its inspiration from games like Banjo-Kazooie, Crash Bandicoot and even Donkey Kong 64, but can it deliver on its premise? Sadly, no. It has some neat ideas and I did enjoy the first 10 minutes or so but it soon became apparent that this game doesn’t have anywhere near the level of quality or at times, playability of a typical platformer.

It’s very rough around the edges, you can’t tell if you’ve hit an enemy or not, the camera fights you at critical moments of platforming and you have to jump in a post box to change characters all the time. I get that the last point is trying to pay homage to the barrel switching in DK64 but this just slows the game down and honestly, would have been better with a simple button tap to swap characters like in a LEGO game. It also seems to take way longer than DK64 for some reason.

There are 4 characters you can switch between and each has their own abilities to get across large gaps or to move heavy objects and the like. I personally think it would have made more sense for one character to be able to do it all, but I do like that the game has split-screen co-op so you can divide and conquer. The visuals are simplistic and the framerate seems to be steady for the most part, but the game does have its glitchy moments that hinder progress.

The Verdict

Paperman: Adventure Delivered sadly doesn’t live up to its name. It takes some good ideas from other collectathon platformers but lacks any real polish for it to be considered enjoyable. It’s a shame as I love collectathon platformers with Banjo-Kazooie being one of my favourite games of all time, so to see a game like it that fails this much in terms of quality is disappointing.

Score: 5.5

Disclosure: I received a free review copy of this product from https://www.keymailer.co