Pacific Drive Review (PlayStation 5 & PC)

It’s pushing midnight, and I’m suddenly finding myself perched beneath the hood of yet another stowaway vehicle, scrounging for supplies to lug back to my station wagon. It’s dark, and the anomaly-filled world is hot on my heels, beckoning for me to retreat back to the safety of my garage before the exclusion zone swallows me whole. The only thing is, I’m not quite ready to part ways with my latest excursion into the wild. There are components out there that I need in order to progress deeper into the underbelly of the opaque dimension — and there isn’t a chance in hell that I’m going to let them slip between my fingers before sunrise. It’s all or nothing, and I’m about to risk it all, if only to see what looms beyond the other side of Pacific Drive.

For the record, Pacific Drive is all about survival, as well as one person’s desperate attempts to reach the core of the Olympic Exclusion Zone—a beacon that just so happens to project hostility, suspicion, and an array of anomalies that operate under the cover of darkness. It’s within this tainted version of the Pacific Northwest that you, a rather unfortunate survivor, must delve into the depths of the forbidden zone, and, with the help of your trusty automobile, unravel the mysteries pertaining to its inner nexus.

Ironwood Studios describes Pacific Drive as a “road-lite” experience—a play on words that loosely emulates the core features of a traditional rogue-lite design. It isn’t a blueprint that we’ve seen all that much over the years (with the exception of Kona, perhaps), which is precisely why I, for one, felt the urge to examine it when it came to light a little earlier this week. The question is, was it a trip worth taking?

The Shortest Road Trip

Remember Mad Max—an open-world action-adventure game that chained its players to the ever-allusive goal of fixing up their cars? Well, it’s the same basic setup in Pacific Drive: there’s an old station wagon, a hostile world that’s covered from head to toe in a gloomy veil of fog, and a whole lot of government-related activity preventing its inhabitants from escaping through the smokescreen of its own questionable motives.

Set in the 1990s, Pacific Drive transports its players to the root of all evil—an exclusion zone that’s seemingly infamous for its suspicious behavior and cryptic past. You play as a lone delivery driver—a poor courier who’s trapped within the walled region and left to fend off the antics that circulate around town. Fortunately for said poor soul, they do have the broken bones of an old station wagon to call their own—a beat up bit of kit that barely has the capacity to carry its passengers through the zone for short periods of time before breaking down. And believe me when I say, it does break down…a lot.

If you take any modern racing game into account, then you’ll no doubt have met your admirable share of car crashes and minimal consequences. Well, that isn’t the case here, as a single slap on the bumper is more than enough to send your makeshift four-wheeler buckle and swerve into a pool of acid and, you know, explode. Suffice it to say, if you can’t drive — then you’re probably going to hate this one.

Breaking Down

The goal of Pacific Drive is relatively simple: venture into the thick of the zone, and forage for electrical components to upgrade your car. There is, albeit a small one, a storyline to follow, which mostly revolves around other prisoners’ joint efforts to study and escape the walled area, but for the most part, it’s merely the case of following a mute driver as they make daring advances in and out of the storm. And therein lies the gameplay loop on a silver platter: build, repair, explore, and rinse and repeat.

In each new run, you’ll come to discover new parts for your car—shoddy fragments that can either boost your ride’s overall performance, or make it a little less, well, breakable. The bad news is, it isn’t just the case of adding a bit of fuel to the tank every once in a while, as there are also several other things to keep tabs on, including doors, wipers, panels, headlights, and of course, the battery — all of which can crumble at any given moment, especially if subjected to the phenomena that circulates the borders. It’s your job, as the driver, to keep the damage to a minimum — which is a lot easier said than done.

Of course, there’s a bit more to it than simply keeping your car in check and your eyes on the road; there are also scavenging missions to embark on, too, and not to mention a series of science-related requests to keep you on your toes as you comb through the misty crags and crevices of the exclusion zone. For the most part, though, it is, really, a drawn-out fetch quest that involves scraping the bottom of the barrel and playing cat-and-mouse with your warning lights for a dozen or more hours.

“I’m Not a Mechanic”

I’d like to take this moment to not only apologize to my brother (a mechanic by trade, thankfully), but to also acknowledge the importance of being able to tweak things that the average person isn’t capable of. For the record, I am that dim-witted person—an idiot by trade, if anything at all, and one who’s never quite been able to tell the difference between a screen wash bowl and an oil filter. In ways, this makes me the worst possible candidate for Pacific Drive, whereas my brother, on the other hand, is an ideal sort, and someone who would likely be better suited for handling toxic conditions and hand-me-down mechanical components whilst under the watchful gaze of a ravenous storm.

You see, Pacific Drive isn’t for the ill-tempered, let alone for those without the patience of a petrolhead. In fact, it’s for another audience — an audience that, weirdly enough, enjoys the idea of starting from scratch several times over, and applying small changes in order to make the smallest of steps in the right direction. To put it bluntly, this is ninety percent of what Pacific Drive is: watching your car break into a million little pieces, and then venturing out to fill the blanks for the sake of returning it to its former glory.

If you’re lucky, you’ll complete a mission or two from one of your local contacts, but if you manage to roll into a puncture, then you’ll have to rewind the clock and make amends before being able to continue. And I think I speak for everyone when I say this: mechanic or not, nobody wants to fix the same old banger a hundred times over — even if it is the only lifeline that’s keeping you afloat and tethered to living world.

Verdict

I will put my hands up and say this: when I wasn’t stapling my eyes to the hood of my ridiculously unreliable station wagon for the umpteenth time, I was, for lack of a better word, content. With that said, when things did start to go wrong (and they went wrong a lot), I was often left wondering whether or not the time and effort was going to be worth the payout—a reward that I, for so long, believed to have never existed, to begin with. I wanted the credits to roll, and I wanted to push my station wagon (I called it Clive) to the edge of the atlas, but I also didn’t want to have to deal with the same monotonous fetch quests a dozen times over in order to get there.

Pacific Drive isn’t a bad game, but its short-sighted gameplay loop does begin to take its toll on you after a short while, and it doesn’t help that the vast majority of its tasks often revolve around the same basic pick-up quests and other relatively mindless tasks that you’ve no doubt seen a dozen or so times before. However, when the snowball does begin to roll, things do tend to get a lot better — if not in the storyline department, then in the procedurally generated world itself—a landscape that’s forever evolving and coughing up new surprises for you to unfold as you crawl from one marker to the next.

To put it simply, Pacific Drive has more than enough prime material to keep you entwined for a handful of hours, and perhaps even a little more, so long as you don’t mind burying your head in the sand long after the storm has rolled on by. The question is, though, can you tolerate it?