Honestly a really good game but the main reason I have to give this a 2.5 and not a good rating is simply because of the devastating bugs I ran into while playing this on PS5. I should say that very rarely did I run into bugs but when I did they almost always involved mission items not spawning in or the game not registering that I interacted with them, which ended up bricking my save on two separate occasions. The most recent one having occurred 22 hours into the game and did not allow me to progress the story as the game did not register that I had picked up a blueprint related to the main story. I looked for solutions online and learned that this had bricked my save and that many other people also experienced this issue. Due to this I never beat the game despite being on the second last mission of the story. In conclusion my advice is get this game on sale or for full price its a really cool and creative experience but make sure to have backup saves and keep your eyes open for these bugs.

!Pacific Drive iamge

Pacific Drive is what would happen if Herbie and Subnautica had a child. In fact, I don't think I've seen this particular blend of survival-suspense-story mix in a game since Subnautica, and that's saying a lot.

Instead of a submarine, you drive a station wagon. Instead of aliens underwater, you encountered anomalies on the road. The idea is similar: scan objects, research, get materials, and upgrade. But the mechanics of the game revolve heavily around your car, which you can upgrade (and fix), and the sci-fi story is more engaging with good voice acting.

As a person who got his driving license around the same time the game takes place, the long solitary drives bring back memories, especially with the excellent soundtrack, played as stations on the radio. These fun runs can quickly turn into suspenseful moments, especially during the night. The game also messes with your head with all kind of quirks, and I found myself wondering if i was encountering a bug in game or something planned more than once.

For those who seek challenges, there's plenty here. Too many, in fact, so I had to tune some of them down. For example, the game won't let you save mid-drive, and if you quit, you lose all of the stuff you collected. I can understand this as a difficulty option, but this is an unfair punishment if you have to quit the game on a long mission, which can take 2 hours or more.

It's too bad the game doesn't have official Linux support, as I believe this game was built for a certain kind of Linux geeks, but it seems to work OK with Linux (or Mac) with Proton enabled. If you're a sci-fi person who likes suspenseful games with a dosage of crafting, don't pass this one up. You won't regret it.

I really like a lot of the things that this game does. I like the concept, style, voice acting, music, ambiance, and plenty more. The gameplay is fine, though very repetitive. I usually don't mind games that cap at 30 fps, but for a game that can be very fast-paced it is definitely held back.
However, the biggest reason why I dropped this game is it actually makes me motion-sick. This is no fault of the game, I just get motion-sick very easily so I just can't keep going. It's quite unfortunate because I do like the progression system of researching to improve your garage.

So, even though I'm abandoning this game after 20 or so hours, I am quite impressed with Ironwood Studios' debut game and I will certainly be watching their future projects. I feel as if they are a studio that does a lot of things right, and I'm definitely a fan. I just hope their future projects don't involve driving as much.

Unsure if Shelved or Abandoned. Probably Abandoned but you gotta believe in yourself. I think this is a game I would have really enjoyed a few years ago, but I think I've grown tired of anything survival-crafting adjacent.

The world building is neat and I liked the cast of characters. I enjoyed taking care of the car, but found harvesting materials to be a bit too tedious given the durability of the tools. Gathering resources so you can build tools to gather resources is just not very compelling to me nowadays.

Good for fans of survival crafting, road trips, and mysterious alternate realities.

played for around 8 hours and I still do not have a clue how this game expects to be played. collecting resources is mind numbing and boring, I don’t feel like there’s any real stakes, all upgrades seem to just lessen the effect of frustrating mechanics instead of making the game more fun, and the cool ”being chased by a weird laws-of-physics-defying storm and driving into a pillar of fire” thing has not really materialized at all as it’s been really easy so far.

massively disappointed, but the vibes are really cool :)

Probably one of the best survival games out there, owing mostly to the survival meters and aspects being localized to something external to the player character and therefore giving the impression that you're doing maintenance that makes sense instead of having to drink water every forty-five seconds. A lot of the elements such as the fuel and battery gauge are also fairly forgiving if you're not just leaving your car running with the headlights on. The world and design is interesting but the story feels a bit too esoteric and obscure in an attempt to compliment the eldritch science aesthetics. Feels like the story is trying to be more mysterious than it needs to be but the actual character content picks up that slack and does deliver and interesting supernatural story to be the basis of one far more grounded in survivors guilt and mourning.

I think I'm definitely a fan of these fantasy everyday games. Games where you do some sort of job or task that would be rudimentary and then apply some extra twist to it. Hardspace Shipbreaker was repairing spaceships, Mortuary Assistant pretty self explanatory, and now Pacific Drive where you repair and drive a car in a collapsing alternate dimension.

That's the basic loop of the game after all. You drive around in first person through areas that have been abandoned due to strange happenings in the story. Sections of "the pacific" that have been quarantined off due to a paranormal catastrophe. You find yourself stuck there and try to get yourself out with the help of some experts on "The Zone" who have stayed behind to study it.

That's the real meat of the narrative anyway, the characters who talk at you. As you go through the game, this ragtag few nerds reveal a bit about themselves through triumphs and troubles. It's fairly compelling learning more about them and how they interact and why they're there at all. More than can be said for you yourself. Your character and circumstances are, pardon the pun, along for the ride and a vehicle to move the story along to find out more about these folk. There's some vague intrigue about the space you're in and how everything got fucked up but they don't go into it too much.

As I say though, the game consists of setting out on a route, driving around the weird environment of pillars rising from the ground, exploding mannequins, and radiation everywhere. You usually have some sort of thing you're looking for to switch on or collect and bring back to the "home base". As you're out though, you can also scavenge the abandoned areas and collect various materials. Then when you do go back to base, you can make new things for the car.

Maintaining and upgrading the car so you can have a better time driving around is the fun of the game I think. As you drive through places you might wreck the car hitting things or getting flat tires or something in the environment electrocutes you or a storm passes by and messes with the car's systems. Fortunately, you probably scavenged when you were out and now back at the base you get to craft replacement doors and panels and tires for the car. Eventually you gain upgrades and improve the parts or even the engine and can add things like more space or a hand break. It's not like super in depth mechanic stuff but it's enough to make you feel accomplished.

The upgrades, by the way, are what make the game extra exciting. To acquire blueprints for car/garage upgrades, you need to collect energy from out in The Zone. The tricky thing is, you get this energy from points on the map that keep the area you're in stable. So you remove these stability cores for upgrades but then reality starts to collapse around you. After you get enough cores, you can summon a portal to get back to base but you have to FLOOR IT to outrun the Fortnite-esque circle storm closing around the map and deteriorating everything it passes. It's really quite thrilling and hectic when you get into it and you're like missing a door or two and have a flat tire and you just PRAY you get to the pillar of light representing your way back to safety. Good stuff.

That said, there's a lot of accessibility options to counter how hard you want it for yourself. The game has almost survival game levels of things to worry about. You have your own health, the car parts health, the car's battery and fuel. Even watching out for radiation depending on how much damage your car takes or if your car skids on wet roads. The accessibility options can balance these things out. Maybe you just want to focus on driving around and some upgrades for the car as you do the story?

That's what I did towards the end. I put some of them on to make it less tedious to get through the rest. I enjoyed the game but I got to a point where I just wanted to finish it up. I didn't go as far as making myself or the car invulnerable but having things like keeping yourself safe while in the car or not having to worry about fuel saves some time. I do enjoy little things like upkeep and siphoning fuel on the road to keep it going.

That's the one thing about this game. It's not really something to be rushed. Played it in bits over the last two months or so. As you explore deeper into the zone your routes have you stopping in more and more areas. If you try to just rush through without any accessibility stuff on you get a severely damaged car and no parts to repair or replace. There's a "friendly dumpster" that will dispense some materials after each run but it's not something to be dependent on. The game really has you play by its rules and pacing and it's most enjoyable when you just give in and go with it.

That said, I'm done with it for now. I finally got to the end of the story and rolled credits. Due to different circumstances of the story, only the least interesting character is left to talk in my ear as I drive around exploring and documenting the weird things in The Zone. Just not something I wanna do right now. I could definitely see coming back to it at some point for a cozy supernatural hellscape drive but after a couple months I've just had my fill.

It's definitely a great game but would only recommend to people who like doing the more mundane type tasks in games with a slight twist. The fun characters make the story fun and you get as much out of it as you put in. Check it out if that sounds like your thing!

For a couple of weeks, the core loop of this game had me hooked. I wasn't even trying to progress the main story, I would just go out on runs, scavenge a couple materials, repair the car, rinse, repeat. And really, it's diagnosing the quirks and performing repairs that kept me playing. It's tedious, it can be boring at times, but I got some serious satisfaction out of fixing every little problem. It scratches the same itch as something like Powerwash Simulator.

I can see people easily bouncing off of this game if they don't gel with that loop, because everything else is fine at best. The controls are wonky, navigating the menus takes some adjusting, the story is average. Look up gameplay (you always should), and pick this up if you think restoring the car looks like something you'd enjoy.