Very fun concept! Clear inspiration from Roadside Picnic/Stalker only with a beat up old woody station wagon as your best friend. The mechanic....mechanics aren't intrusive or too complicated so you don't have to be a car enthusiast to enjoy it, the car is very modular in that fashion (put the wheels on the rotors, put the engine in the engine bay etc). The world is fun to rip around and explore and the anomalies are varied and interesting to encounter. The only things that irked me is sometimes the writing doesnt always land but it isnt awful. Death can be quite punishing as theres no saving mid-run (you have to do a corpse run to get whatever shit you had in the trunk back.) Overall very relaxing ""rogue"" type game that succeeds in that feeling of falling in love with your piece of shit car!

It's an interesting take on the survival gathering game. Your car is your lifeline and your mobile base. Early on it's interesting but there was a certain lack of variety in the gameplay. And just some friction.

Partly why I stopped playing is that I needed to complete a mission, but you can't just go from your base to the mission, you have to go from map to map. For this one I had to go 3 maps deep and I ultimately end up failing the mission due to something popping out of the ground I couldn't avoid. Ultimately wrecking my car and losing quite a bit of stuff I had spent the last 90 minutes collecting. And the game wasn't grabbing me enough to do it again.

A toolbelt would have also helped, half my inventory was just tools.

The concept is neat but it could use some iteration to keep it interesting after the first few hours. The story has been done before and the concept of voices over the radio explaining everything isn't particularly compelling.

I was immediately hooked when I started playing! the core gameplay loop is immensely satisfying and it took a while for the thrill of looting and building up my car to wear off. the radio soundtrack is amazing! I also loved that you get a bunch of different pride flags to put on your car right away.

the story end up feeling a little boring, and the pacing of the game feels off. by the end of the game some of the story missions felt tedious to me and made the game end on a bit of a low note. overall I enjoyed my time with this really unique game!

It's...fine. At the start the game is great, fun characters, good looting system, gameplay loop is engaging but it gets repetetive really quickly and makes you care alot less about upgrades and looting to the point where i just didn't loot any houses in the last hours. The game makes it easier to survive with no looting thanks to the car in the garage that remakes itself every time and the friendy dumpster (my beloved), with that you have enough materials to survive but not enough to get the best upgrades which you don't need at all to be fair. It's a solid game that runs well (which is rare in theese days unfortunately) and doesn't stay too long to be tedious, it took me around 15 hours to beat the story with not alot of side looting.

For the first 20 hours of this thing I felt like I was playing an all-time cult classic. Phenomenal weirdo atmosphere, incredible blend of a really satisfying survival loop and beautiful cinematic worldbuilding. Everything about fighting your way out of a storm, repairing the car, and upgrading it piece by piece feels so tangible in the best way. Maybe I loved it too much early on, cause I spent so long in act 1 that I left myself a lot of game to get through by the time things started to feel repetitive and worn out. It just doesn't feel worth taking any time to engage with the mid-zone and deep zone in any way when you've done the same routes 10 times over and the only reward will be incremental upgrades that aren't remotely needed to complete the main story. My lasting memory will definitely be those first 20 hours though. Absolutely nothing else that feels like this

Good game! The constant drive (hehe) to make my car better definitely pushed me through this one. Funnily it took me right to the end of the game to finally upgrade my engine and realise how handicapped I had been for the 19 hours prior. But still I loved the journey of every trip, coming back and adding a new gadget or piece of bodywork to my car which eventually made it into an acceptable vehicle. I will say it definitely felt like it dragged towards the end, the gameplay loop of going on longer and longer routes was getting tiresome and I felt myself just speeding through later routes to get to the objective but overall still a very fun game that I recommend.

Pacific Drive is a game that on paper seems fairly straight forward, you drive a car across some maps and collect resources as you go which allow you to upgrade your car and progress further into the map. This is true, but it undersells just how much work goes into turning your car from a pile of shit into something that can turn rain into fuel and within radiation damage and give you a gravity boost etc.

That really is the high level overview of the game, along with an interesting aesthetic, Pacific Drive is a fun game to do a run or two in a session since a run can be anywhere from 20-45 minutes but its not a roguelite you can binge through say like Hades, as it can be quite taxing and a grind at times, especially near the endgame, if you are looking for specific resources, because while all the info is available to you in game, its not going to hold you hand either.

That also extends to the actual maintenance and upgrading of your car. If you run out of fuel for example, you don't just press the fill fuel button, you have to grab the gas pump and put it into the fuel tank and wait for it to fill and then put the pump back. If something is wrong with a door or wheel you have to inspect it and if needs sealant or replacing you have to manually get the sealing kit or replacement part and disassemble the old part and put in the new part and then breakdown the old part for scrap because nothing should go to waste when you need resources. It can take a while to get used to all the bits and bobs that go into taking care of your car and unlocking new components and even gear for you to wear while outside of the car but once you get into the swing of things it does all play like a well oiled machine and you really do start to bond with the car, bond as in you will feel miserable if it gets destroyed on a run and you have to remake shit on the car all over again lol

I think this is the first survival-crafting game I've played, so there may have been a learning curve here for me that other players could have skipped. It took me a few runs to see the loop of looting and repairing your car fully set in, but once I fully understood it I think that was the point where I began to lose interest with the game. I never really felt much sense of satisfaction when I completed a run, and I was especially annoyed when I would screw up the ending of a run after the rest of it had gone smoothly. I get the sense that these mechanics are intrinsic to a game like this though, so I'm not sure if I was ever going to play this to completion.

That said, there are a lot of things I do like quite a bit about this. I actually really like methodically getting the car ready for the next run, even though it is literally just working through a checklist. Driving and interacting with/via the car itself also felt novel in a game of this type, and though the ends of runs where I failed were frustrating, the ones where I succeeding were almost always exhilarating (a tough line to walk). Expanding on that, the atmosphere surrounding everything in Pacific Drive is what hooked me initially, and kept me playing for the 10 or so hours that I did stick with it.