Paperman: Adventure Delivered

First there was Mail Mole, an adorable 3D platformer where a cartoony mole will stop at nothing to deliver your important letters. Now comes Paperman: Adventure Delivered, an equally adorable 3D platformer where a bunch of mail-related characters save the people’s packages from a greedy dragon. Are all of our recent character-driven platformers being programmed by disgruntled postal workers or is being a mailman suddenly trendy? I’m not sure we’re going to get to the bottom of those questions, but we still have a lot to talk about when I review Paperman: Adventure Delivered by Mindscape.

When an evil dragon steals mail and packages from the nearby post office, it’s up to Paperman and his team of parcel-related heroes to track down the missing goods and put thieving dragon in his place.

That’s the set-up to Paperman: Adventure Delivered, a 3D platformer inspired by the genre greats found on the Nintendo 64. It’s a game where you’ll need to use all four members of the team to collect all of the scattered letters, packages, envelopes, feathers and more. It’s bright and colorful and has a goofy premise, what could go wrong?

We’ll get to that in a moment, but first we need to talk about this unique team of heroes. In true video game fashion, each character has a unique ability that you’ll need to exploit to explore every inch of the island. Paperman has a double jump and can teleport using the letters he throws. Carl is a big box that can push heavy objects around. Scrolly is thin and light, allowing him to glide through the air and float up using vents. The final member of the team is Express, a speedy letter that can run over platforms before they crumble under the weight. You’ll be constantly switching between these four characters in order to solve the puzzles and collect the golden envelopes, which in turn will get you one step closer to fighting the mail-stealing dragon.

The game is actually really good about pointing out the different paths depending on which character you’re playing. Sometimes you can travel the same path with multiple heroes, while others will be designed for only one. The cool thing is that there are often multiple ways to each part of the level, offering quite a bit of variety when collecting the hundreds of items scattered around the levels.

Before things turn negative, I do want to point out a few of the things that I really liked about Paperman: Adventure Delivered. A good example of that is the level construction, which is mostly really well done. Each of the different locations you visit are huge and full of off-the-beaten-path spots for you to discover and explore. There are entire enclosed locations on each of the islands, and I really like how everything is connected and how you’ll need to use all four of the characters to solve the puzzles and just get around. The large, open level designs reminded me a lot of the old school 3D platformers, where you’ll find something new to do and uncover behind every rock.

The game is also smart with how it presents these massive levels. No matter if it’s your first time visiting or your tenth, each stage starts with a lengthy fly-over of the land, showing you some of the key spots and where you can find a lot of the collectables. This fly-over also illustrates how different the stages are. For example, most of the action in the first stage, Manyfaced Island, involves little more than simple platforming to collect everything, while later stages will have lengthy puzzles you’ll need to solve in order to collect all of the letters. From a level construction perspective, Paperman gets pretty much everything right.

That said, between the gameplay and camera, it gets pretty much everything else wrong. To put it politely, this game is busted. It is, without question, one of the worst-playing 3D platformers I’ve ever seen. Between the horribly sloppy gameplay, the imprecise controls and the laggy feel, it turns even the most basic tasks into a nightmare deathtrap. I found it almost impossible to judge simple jumps or even walk in a straight line. And if you do somehow successfully land on a platform, you might just slip off, because every part of this game feels like you’re walking on ice. There are literally elevators you can’t ride because the hero will shake so hard that they fall straight through the platform.

The gameplay in Paperman is so bad that I honestly thought about forgoing the usual review and just posting a super-cut of my four characters dying in absurd ways. I have hundreds (if not thousands) of examples of absolutely ridiculous deaths, none of which would have happened in a better platformer. The footage makes it look like I’m drunk or having some major health problems while playing this game, yet that couldn’t be further from the truth. It’s just a perfect storm of gameplay issues combined with cheap deaths that are almost impossible to avoid. And just to add insult to injury, every death followed by a lengthy load time. It’s just the worst.

It's worth mentioning that the gameplay is only made worse by the horrendous camera problems. While most of the game will give you control over the camera, you’ll often run into parts of the level where that control is taken away. These are sloppy sections where the camera darts around at a dizzying pace. The rapid back and forth of the camera angles is enough to make somebody sick. These are the types of camera problems you expected to see 25 or 30 years ago, not in a modern platformer. It’s completely unacceptable.

And did I mention that the camera options are actually busted, with no fix in sight. Paperman is the type of game that simply refuses to remember your saved preferences. If you’re somebody who prefers an inverted Y-axis (like me), then you’re going to have to change the options every single time you select a new character. The game simply refuses to remember. And it’s actually worse than that, because you can save your preferences and then go back in to find that they have reverted back to the default.

The truth is, Paperman came out quite a few months ago. This is a late review, there’s no getting around it. So late, in fact, that I normally would have skipped right over it. However, after playing the game and experiencing all of these gameplay and technical problems, I felt like I had to say something. This is a game that has been out for nearly half a year, and it still refuses to save my camera preferences. It’s that old and I’m still running into game-breaking bugs that force me to reset the game. Where’s the support? Where are the patches? I expect these types of problems at launch, not half-a-year later.

And that’s disappointing, because I genuinely enjoyed the developer’s previous game – Hourglass. It too had some weird gameplay quirks that probably needed to be patched, but that wasn’t a dealbreaker. It is when it comes to Paperman: Adventure Delivered. While the idea of changing between a bunch of post office-related characters is a good one, this game is a nightmare to control and is impossible to recommend. Let’s hope that Secret Item Games’ next release isn’t this busted.