Parcel Corps Review - Can This New Indie Game Live Up to Crazy Taxi & Jet Set Radio Comparisons?
Hello everyone and welcome to another edition of The Good Game Lobby Review. Today we have a Dreamcast-era-inspired indie game, Parcel Corps. Let’s hop on your bikes and deliver a great time.
Bike Stranding
In Parcel Corps, you are a bicycle courier making a name for yourself in New Island. You choose one of three rival companies—Wallaby Wheelers, East Coast Couriers, or Das-la Post—each competing to dominate the delivery market. You face off against rivals using tricks, jumps, and grinds to navigate the densely car-filled city. Things take an odd turn when your work is overshadowed by Rich Villainé, the CEO of Polar Petroleum. His political ambitions threaten the city, if not the world, and it's up to you to take him down one delivery at a time.
Training Wheels
Let’s get right into the gameplay. The way you ride the bike feels like a Tony Hawk game with how it controls with the thumbstick and pressing A to move faster.
X is to jump, and holding it down gives you a larger jump for reaching new heights or wall riding.
Railings are marked clearly in bright yellow, and jumping up to them and pressing the Left Bumper lets you grind on them. You’ll notice many of the city’s environments are painted with splashes of yellow, sometimes even arrows, that give you a clear direction of where to wall ride and grind your way to a faster delivery route.
You press X while in the air to perform tricks like bar spins and tail whips, which add to a meter that, once full, you can activate for an added boost. You can continue the boost as long as you perform tricks and grinds while riding.
Now onto the deliveries themselves.
This is set up almost exactly like Crazy Taxi—they even do the camera swing around in the same style. You go up to a business in the city and scan a QR code that activates that establishment. Now you can make deliveries for them. They range from a pizzeria, ice cream shop, laundromat, and many more, with voice acting accompanying each one. The voice acting, though great at times, comes off very stereotypical with the accents portrayed, and after 6 hours of playing, it was tough to keep listening to them talk when all I wanted to do was ride around the city, so I was skipping many, many scenes. What’s unfortunate is some of the storytelling and 4th wall breaking comes up, but it was tedious.
Deliveries are straightforward: pick up an item and deliver it to the customer. As you progress, you unlock new delivery types. For instance, some deliveries have a meter because you need to perform tricks in order to mix the ingredients of the delivery, but don’t go over for fear of ruining it.
Some packages are marked fragile, so getting hit by a car or falling from a great height causes the package damage. A newspaper is struggling and asks you to put up advertisements, which is where the Jet Set Radio influence jumps out to me. You ride around stopping to place the posters or wall ride to reach higher placements. Another one is an ice cream shop owner having trouble with birds, or a nerd having trouble with geeks, so you ride around scaring them all off to complete a task and unlock more deliveries. One of my favorites is the underground team of people you run into who are trying to take down the establishment, so you ride around taking out antennae and drones around the city to remove the surveillance.
Your goal here is to level up by unlocking new businesses and then doing a delivery rush. That’s when you have a timer set and deliver across the whole area, and you are given a score based on the number of deliveries. This increases the area’s level. You have to reach level 3 to unlock a new area. This is the core of the game, and you repeat this process 8 times. To be honest, by the 4th time, I was a bit tired of this setup. When I would finish a new area, I was praying I wouldn’t unlock a new area, but they just kept coming. This sounds like a huge complaint, and I understand it is, but the new areas are fun to play. It’s just that the type of gameplay required to unlock the next area becomes tired and dragged out.
What’s On Your Headphones?
You have songs that fit the theme of each new area of New Island you explore, giving each area a fresh vibe. When you are out for deliveries, you have a song that lifts the energy to match the action-packed riding, tricks you perform, and quick movement around the city. You have record scratches here or there to complement them, and the soundtrack varies in style, but all felt fantastic. The soundtrack is unfortunately not available online yet, but its one of the best parts of the game so you will have to take my word for it OR watch my video review where I have a section with a song playing.
Loud and Proud
The cel-shaded style reminds me of Crazy Taxi meets Hi-Fi Rush. The characters you meet are a bit exaggerated depending on the company you work for. The world is bright and vibrant, and I was surprised by how many NPCs litter the world. Cars, trucks, and buses are frequent, and you have cops and security who try to take you down with gas clouds or paint that slows you down, which adds more to the busy environments. The areas you unlock have their own unique and distinct look to them. One is filled with canals where you use ships or boats you hop on to navigate the city, parklands which is a gigantic park area with ponds, an industrial area, and even its own Chinatown that looks beautiful. They nailed the visual style, which, though inspired by many games, stands well on its own.
Ride or Die?
When I had a chance to try out the demo, I was blown away by the style of gameplay and ideas that were thrown together to make a premium-looking indie game. Unfortunately, the time it takes to beat the game—10-15 hours—was too much for me. You repeat the same style of deliveries many times over, as I mentioned earlier.
I want to dip into the humor of the game.
The characters you meet are exaggerated and at times even touch on unskippable cutscenes. They break the 4th wall many times, lightening the mood between deliveries. You even meet the CEO in-game, who discusses how you need to make deliveries to ensure the years of development are worth it. It’s a nice touch to break the 4th wall.
Sort of a spoiler warning for those far into the game. The game pulls out to a meeting with Secret Mode, the game’s publisher, and Billy Goat Entertainment, the development team, and they are having a meeting in the real world about a HUGE ending that they can’t afford, or the publisher won’t give more time for. This is drawn out into this wild, over-the-top ending that fits into the game’s sarcastic, comedic themes. As I mentioned earlier, the only thing that took away from some of these moments was the overly stereotypical takes on characters.
One thing I haven’t touched on and waited to add to my conclusion is the bugs. I know when a game launches, this can happen, but I had to restart the game many times because a delivery point wasn’t activating or the person wasn’t there to accept the delivery. I know with a game this polished in other departments, there will be no issue correcting this, but when you have to repeat a delivery that is tough only to find out you can’t finish it because of a bug, it is discouraging, to say the least. You don’t have an option to restart any delivery, so you have to wait the timer out, which at times can be up to 4 minutes, or just restart the game. I recommend a “restart delivery” option as a quality-of-life improvement. When I have a chance I will ride again and update the review if I see any significant changes.
It is a fun delivery game with a great soundtrack, loud and fun visuals, and a style of gameplay reminiscent of some of the best games ever released. What falls short, though, is the length of each chapter, overly similar deliveries, and many visual bugs and glitches. For the price tag, it’s a bit steep, but I have no doubt that with updates and tweaks, it will be a fantastic addition, standing toe-to-toe with the greats like Crazy Taxi and Jet Set Radio.
🎮Parcel Corps | Steam
🗓️Release Date | Out Now!
Lovely review and thanks for pointing out things you also didn’t enjoy. I love the art style and colours and riding around the city like in an old school Tony hawk game sounds fun.
Nice review of Parcel Corps, and a great game for fans of high-paced arcade games. I wish I covered the demo in AIIG, but I didn't take the time to master the controls and really get the game's flow going. Still, I hope this does well. These games used to be very popular.