Pacific Drive

When you get down to it, Pacific Drive is a quietly brilliant game. There's nothing that comes to mind that is like it, and it's an outwardly simple concept that also has a variety of layers. While out on a run, you deftly drive around anomalies and sometimes escape a junction with a tattered car by the skin of your teeth. Other times, you're outfitting your car in the garage while the jukebox is playing, carefully considering what to bring with you and which parts you should have on the car. This game is exactly what I had hoped it would be when I initially heard about it, and it's been a long time since I've played something so boldly different.

Pacific Drive thoughtfully translates simple yet overlooked human aspects through an experience that is truly unique and unforgettable.

Olympic Peninsula and its Exclusion Zone have hidden many secrets for more then three decades and now, after I got pulled in by a mysterious anomaly, it is finally time to reveal them all! But this is no happy tale of a handsome protagonist, but a mere mortal driver’s storyline, which wiggles and twists around a postapocalyptic wasteland. And what better tool to navigate it than a sturdy vehicle, armored with the knowledge of brilliant scientists and quirky tech, that will surely protect me from the horrors of this dystopian world…

Pacific Drive offers a road trip like no other, boasting immaculate sound design and a classic '90s conspiracy delivered through a compact survival-crafting roguelike loop.

Pacific Drive is a mystery that draws you in little by little and rewards you for staying dedicated with both a better vehicle and more ridiculous threats. Every excursion left me wondering just what I’d discover, both from survival and story standpoints, as well as what kind of crazy threats were going to try to make my life harder. Fun and interesting characters and a pretty great soundtrack help to keep things fun, but maintaining the station wagon is easily the most compelling part. It’s your best friend through thick and thin, even if it’s trying to eat your mind. That can be somewhat forgiven since it makes up the core of an ultimately great rogue-lite survival game.

Courage should be rewarded, always. And Pacific Drive is a brave game, offering unique gameplay focused on the exploration of the Zone and the relationship between man and vehicle. We will feel helpless and powerless most of the time, banking on car upgrades to have any hope of surviving in this bleak and hostile environment. The action is slow paced as the protagonist is not an Invincible Super Soldier but an ordinary man in his beat-up car, and this may turn away some fans of driving games, but the high point of this production is the story.

A novel and challenging survival game that puts you in the driver's seat of one the best cars in videogames.

Pacific Drive blends peaceful car maintenance with chaotic - and frequently unnerving - surges of anamolies. Impeccable atmosphere and strong writing are coupled with an enjoyable gameplay loop. Both halves suffer from some limitations, but its a very strong showing nonetheless.

Pacific Drive is like a road trip: It requires a lot of preparation and planning, but the journey is always worth the experience. Just watch out for the radiation.

Pacific Drive so skillfully combines different, basic gameplay mechanics borrowed from other games, and mixes them with amazing atmosphere, that the end-result is a really fresh, original (and difficult!) survival horror.

Pacific Drive is a fantastic survival game with an addictive gameplay loop that involves forging deep connections to junctions, progressing deeper into an ever-changing Zone, upgrading a quirky vehicle, and navigating through challenges that appear on the road ahead.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. has made Roadside Picnic famous, but it harshly mangled the book: S.T.A.L.K.E.R.’s Zone was a zone of armed conflict between various factions and mutants, instead of being a place of mystery and supernatural. Pacific Drive, on the other hand, pays an unexpected tribute to the “feel” of the original book, despite nominally being “a car-driving game”. [Issue#263, p.62]

While some of its looting mechanics feel a little stale in comparison to how it evolves other areas of the genre this likely won’t deter most players from seeing this intriguing story through to the end...Instead, Pacific Drive is one of the most intriguing games I’ve played in 2024 so far. It borrows concepts from the likes of STALKER and Firewatch, and combines them to create an accessible survival rogue-lite that’s a joy to engage with. Seeing your car gradually transform from a heap of junk to essentially a life support system is a satisfying experience, and only enhanced by the weird and wonderful world you get to drive it about in.

While it does get a tad monotonous and predictable by the end, this remains an atmospherically dense survival adventure in an extremely vivid world. Its controls and variety of options deserve a prize.

The premise of Pacific Drive is unique and original in many ways, although in others it can become a bit tedious and tiresome. It is a game in which we must be patient and not go crazy, because it is better to go little by little to avoid falling into despair. Being a first-person survival rogue-lite, it has its own touch and nothing will be the same in each exploration, but for my taste a third-person option would have been good.

Pacific Drive can be broken down easily into other genres, but it's unlike anything available in terms of tone, atmosphere and execution.

Getting used to its well thought out progression systems might take a little too long due to its user interface but once you do it, it’s hard to stop playing Pacific Drive.

Pacific Drive is a weird game. If you want to be swept into story of science gone horribly wrong, enjoy unique twists on the survival genre or have the capacity to fall in love with a car, there’s something here for you. However, its randomness and weird difficulty spikes are likely to be off-putting for others.

The game's crafting and customisation systems work together to form an incredible sense of ownership. [Issue#395, p.108]

Pacific Drive is a rare experience in the space of roguelikes that combines unique mechanics with a deep story that not very many games in the genre offer.

With Pacific Drive, Ironwood Studios has achieved a game with an intoxicating and mysterious atmosphere, which introduces something new to a rather saturated genre through a fresh approach, anchored in systems that complement each other in an extremely intelligent way. Apart from one frustration or another, Pacific Drive is a highly recommended experience for all Survival fans.

Pacific Drive is an extremely atmospheric survival game that draws its appeal from the exuberant inhospitality of the exclusion zone. Loneliness and threatening anomalies turn our old station wagon into our closest ally. If you like roguelikes and crafting, you'll find plenty to do in Pacific Drive

While the story can be confusing, Pacific Drive shines in terms of immersion. It manages to transport you to a unique atmosphere of loneliness, melancholy and nostalgia, bringing back memories of classic TV shows and movies from the 90s.

Pacific Drive is a meticulous game that asks the player to perform a lot of tasks to deal with its many exploration, survival, crafting and customization systems. Offering a rich universe filled with questions and kind of a macabre awe that is definitely unique among many survival games that end up bringing the same chassis with a different skin, the Ironwood Studio game is a gem.

Pacific Drive is a title that exudes passion from every exhaust pipe, and we can only be happy for Ironwood Studios and the love placed in their debut work. It is a game with a solid and well-tested design, but not always as functional as it should. Our advice is not to give up on boarding the station wagon: you might discover that getting lost in the meanders of the Area can have its positive sides and, considering the price of the ticket, you might as well take a tour.

Pacific Drive is a single-player survival game with a gripping atmosphere, ideal for fans of titles like Subnautica. We wouldn't have minded a little more storytelling at the end, so if any DLC comes along, we'll take it!

Pacific Drive is a superb survival game, with stunning landscapes and crafting tools that will see you painstakingly tweaking everything to perfection. With a ton of dangerous anomalies and an unpredictable environment, it’s just as stressful as it is fun.

Ironwood Studios' debut game accomplishes to be an immersive survival driving adventure. Its intense treks through mind-bending obstacles are balanced with humor and relaxing moments provided by crafting and upgrading useful tools and car components, along with Pacific Drive's catchy alternative rock soundtrack. It's an incredibly impressive debut game that should put the new studio on the map: "there's no peace of mind or place you'll see, like riding on Pacific Drive."

A punishing, exhasperating slog, or an off-beat love story between driver and car, human and the Zone? Pacific Drive is both and then some.

With its wonderful depth in both story and gameplay, Pacific Drive is an early hit in 2024. It sets out to create a world that fits comfortably in the New Weird genre but brings its own style and substance to it. The road from unreliable bucket of bolts to souped-up charger is a fascinating one whether you're unraveling the game's many mysteries or improving your wagon for its next road trip. Though the game can be especially hard to decipher, difficulty options help to counter some of its more overwhelming aspects. I'll stick to bikes in my day-to-day life through the actual northwest, but in Pacific Drive, I'm up for another joy ride through one hell of a winding road.

Pacific Drive is a unique RPG and survival crafting game in a landscape choked with unimaginative copycats and clones. That alone makes it worth checking out. Its story, atmosphere and basic loop are engaging and satisfying. At the default difficulty though, its design and mechanics can frustrate in ways that neither skill or time can overcome. Pacific Drive offers a refreshing RPG experience but the ride is sometimes bumpier than intended.

Pacific Drive successfully reinterprets the core of the survival genre, centered around the bond with your station wagon. While the POV driving mechanics and the anomalies often provide relentless, occasionally exhausting challenges, the game still retains a charm that makes you want to take the wheel once again.

An innovative survival experience that requires practice and frustration tolerance, but rewards you with a unique gameplay experience.

Pacific Drive must be given the time it deserves to understand its myriad parameters and be able to appreciate them properly. But the atmosphere and the special relationship you create with the car really elevate the experience to a thoroughly enjoyable level. Naturally striking with its attractive concept, Ironwood Studios' game compensates for a redundant gameplay loop with a unique character.

As I said up top, the whole game is something you’re either going to love or hate. Pacific Drive isn’t going to leave many (or any) people saying, “Enh, it was okay.” You might think it’s a brilliant take on the survival genre, or you might think it’s endless amounts of busy work without enough of a payoff, but either way, it’s guaranteed to get a reaction out of you.

Pacific Drive toes the line between “challenging fun take on the survival-horror genre” and “too complicated for its own good.” The game is full of interesting lore, hardcore crafting mechanics, and a world of driving with plenty to explore. While the driving can feel repetitive at times, if you can get a hold of the system, you’ll have plenty of fun in the Pacific Northwest.

Pacific Drive captures the spirit of working on your car in a game that heavily leans into the crafting experience over its driving roguelike elements.

A love letter to Boris and Arkady that brings their anomalous horrors to the Pacific Northwest. Pacific Drive makes up for what it gets wrong in pacing with imaginative gameplay and exceptional design.

A singular survival game steeped in an unnerving world, Pacific Drive pairs meticulous management with intense excursions that will test your motoring mettle. Balancing its symphony of systems can sometimes be an overly punishing process, but the riveting tension of each run was enough to keep me on my toes even through some repetitious pain points. And when my battered station wagon came screaming out of the portal to safety with no doors and a dead engine, I always felt compelled to fix its faults, buckle back in, and maybe play with the Laika bobblehead on the dash. That frustrating hunk of metal was mine, after all.

Pacific Drive has so much potential. The idea of a survival game with a car as main protagonist is great, the world looks wonderful and the story is interesting. But when we have to escape the radiation, everything becomes unnecessarily annoying. The balancing and some features should get a bit of rework, then Pacific Drive will be overall really enjoyable.

There’s a lot here that feels great, but it’s the inconsistency that lets it down. All those great moments are padded by a framework that doesn’t do them enough justice. Too much emphasis on scrounging, an unfocused narrative, and a generally poor feeling of momentum and progression. I’m still certain that there are some who will be able to overlook the game’s flaws and latch onto its unique charm. However, I think just as many people are going to bounce right off it. Either way, it isn’t a comfortable ride.