An Excellent Reality-Bending Survival Adventure

Summary

• Pacific Drive offers a unique single-player driving survival experience with high-risk, high-reward gameplay.
• The game features mysterious anomalies instead of traditional enemies, requiring reflexes and creativity.
• Crafting, repairing the car, and exploring zones in Pacific Drive create a rewarding and challenging adventure.

Pacific Drive is Ironwood Studios’ debut title, a twisted, intriguing driving/survival game that takes players into unexpected places with its high-risk, high-reward gameplay. While not without the occasional stumble, Pacific Drive is one of themost inventive and satisfying survival games in years.

A mysterious first-person single-player game where players drive a station wagon through North America’s beautiful Pacific Northwest, Pacific Drive can be oddly relaxing; until the game’s story takes a few strange turns into the abnormal. Eccentric scientific research has made the land unstable, and it will be up to the driver and their increasingly upgradable car to survive as reality breaks around them.

A Challenging, Customizable Journey

Players are immediately dropped into Pacific Drive‘s Olympic Exclusion Zone, an area filled with electric-charged mists, radiation, strange creatures, and other anomalies. After fixing up a broken-down station wagon, the player begins to work with a team of scientists over the radio and must uncover resources and the zone’s mysteries to survive. The only thing that often separates players from fatal dangers in the zones is Pacific Drive‘s highly customizable car.

Pacific Drive doesn’t have traditional enemies that use weapons to shoot at the player. The dangers faced here are anomalies that can cause a range of effects and damage to the player, the car, and even parts of the environment. Depending on the stability of particular zones, anomalies will test the player’s reflexes, preparation, patience, and possibly even their imagination.

Certain anomalies may cause drastic damage to the wagon, while others may violently pull it in a bad direction at an even worse time. While some anomalies are more intimidating than others, gravity is often the most dangerous enemy. The variation in obstacles never seemed to grow stale while progressing through the game’s story and ever-increasingly unstable areas. Ironwood Studios’ believes the story can be completed in around 15 hours. However, nearly 30 hours in, there is still a lot to uncover in Pacific Drive, and it’s a challenging campaign that’s hard to stop thinking about.

Pacific Drive’s Garage Is A Beautifully Implemented Home Base

The safety of the garage will soon be a welcoming sight. There, repairs can be made, blueprints unlocked, and hundreds of valuable items can be crafted in the home base, all while the game’s catchy soundtrack plays over the loud jukebox. Ironwood Studios made crafting, repairing, and improving Pacific Drive‘s car an engrossing proposition. Similarly to Death Stranding‘s evolving environments, multiple zones that need to be traversed between objectives can punish players who don’t take care of their transportation and are unprepared for the unexpected.

The humor, music, and sense of supernatural adventure create an incredibly balanced vibe while playing
Pacific Drive
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Areas explored in Pacific Drive are littered with abandoned buildings and decaying vehicles that should be explored for useful items. Supernatural occurrences can be a marvel to behold or an explosive surprise that’ll make players happy they packed a spare tire in their secondary trunk space. Stability cores must be found and taken to create a monumental glowing portal to get back to the garage. But beware, when that portal is opened, sirens begin to ring, fatal radiation storms close in, anomalies get angrier, and the gas peddle needs to be pressed.

Replayability In Pacific Drive Is A Major Selling Point

Death will return the protagonist to the garage, but the wagon will be in tatters, and all the valuable items collected will be lost. Still, it’ll be tempting to collect resources until the last possible moment, as radiation waves begin to enclose the map after a portal is summoned. One close call feet away from the portal included an anomaly pulling the nearly totaled car in the wrong direction while the tires were on the brink of exploding. Health was in the single digits from the storm, so the last-second pass through the portal became a satisfying victory; one that it’s easy to imagine future drivers experiencing and getting hooked on another run through the Pacific Northwest.

Besides helpful resources that can upgrade the wagon to be more resilient towards radiation and electrocution, car cosmetics and audio logs can be found by exploring zones. Exquisite writing and voice acting make Pacific Drive‘s world feel weird, tragic, and sometimes beautiful. Dark humor also helps keep the game’s mood from collapsing in on itself. Eventually, customization options and light-hearted cosmetic items can be found and added to the ride, so even in the darkest and deadliest moments in the game, an adorable puppy bobblehead will be encouraging the driver with reassuring head nods.

The humor, music, and sense of supernatural adventure create an incredibly balanced vibe while playing Pacific Drive. Still, the more zones that are traveled, and the further away players get from their garage, the more tension increases simultaneously. Managing to escape through portals at the last moment is incredibly satisfying, but dying after traversing several zones on a road trip that can last up to an hour in real-time can be extremely frustrating.

The garage is not the central hub of Pacific Drive‘s map, meaning players will need to travel across certain zones multiple times, especially in the game’s later missions. Thankfully, anomalies and instability levels fluctuate, meaning that zones will often provide a different experience with each drive. Resources also respawn when returning to a familiar zone, which can make necessary resource runs a less stressful endeavor.

Final Thoughts and Review Score

4/5

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 Steam Code was provided to Screen Rant for the purposes of this review.

• 

  Pacific Drive

  Platform(s):

  PC, PlayStation 5

  Developer(s):

  Ironwood Studios

  Publisher(s):

  Kepler Interactive

  Genre(s):

  Adventure, Racing, Simulation

  ESRB:

  Rating Pending