Playing Pacific Drive reminds me of an army recruitment advert that was shown on British TV about 20 years ago. A group of soldiers are travelling down a murky road in a Land Rover when they suddenly see the enemy ahead. The front seat passenger starts shouting orders at the driver: “Get off the road! Lights out! Through the trees!” You feel panic as the camera inside the vehicle bounces its suspension over the uneven ground and the driver struggles with the steering wheel to maintain control. It’s a scene you’ll see quite often in the roguelike survival game Ironwood. Well, except instead of a Land Rover, you’re behind the wheel of a rusty station wagon, and instead of a military resistance, you’re running away from paranormal activity.
As far as I’m concerned, these phenomena are a positive change because they are as fascinating as they are threatening. While not extraterrestrial, they are “anomalies” resulting from secret research in this desolate region of the US, they could just as easily have been plucked from an Area 51 conspiracy theory forum – green clouds of radioactive dust, radiant pink mushroom growths, wobbly UFOs, turbocharged metal tumbleweeds, and more. Some of them cause your car’s systems to go crazy, others fry you with electricity, and still others throw you skyward to land with a bone-shaking crash. Add to that natural hazards like falling rocks and trees, and you’re always ready to pull off the side of the road or blindly run into the roadside bushes.
I say blindly because it’s murky more often than lightweight, and your default headlights—when they’re not already smashed—glow in about the same way as candlesticks. So when you’re trying to outrun a radiation or acid storm, there’s always the chance you’ll land in rubble or tumble down a muddy slope after a cross-country sprint at the risk of a sprint. But you do it anyway, as confidently as if a sergeant were sitting next to you shouting, “Get out of the way!” because it’s a hell of a ride. That’s partly because the car’s fragility is so skillfully portrayed—the way it slides and holds, the way it bounces with the suspension loose, the chassis screams, the dashboard lights panic, tense under the extreme pressure. And it’s never tested more than in the mission’s finale, when you’re hurtling toward a teleporter beam, pursued by deadly energy, praying that your ailing metal box will keep moving forward.
But where the military ad ends on such a high note, the sprint finish of Pacific Drive doesn’t. In the peaceful moments on the road or in the garage after the race, you have to repair the damage done by driving a barely drivable vehicle barely on the road. Then comes the arduous process of repairing, sealing, filling and replacing to sew up all the damage done.
As you might expect, it’s less electrifying, but the downtime isn’t unwelcome, especially halfway through your journey. Each expedition into the sealed-off exclusion zone is divided into maps that you traverse in and around. These squares are dotted with buildings you can scavenge for resources, skeletal vehicles you can chip away at for materials or get rid of leftover fuel, and a surprising amount of other elderly stuff you can crack open and hammer into their component parts. But in between foraging for food and close encounters, you’re making ongoing repairs as tires pop and doors break, threatening to fall off their hinges, and it’s uncomplicated to get bogged down in the work. With only the occasional radio contact with a few NPCs as companions, the driver-car bond is the primary character relationship in Pacific Drive: you take care of it, and it takes care of you. Just be careful not to hit your head when you close the trunk.
While Pacific Drive does a good job of executing its solo survival premise, it’s often a bit convoluted, drawn-out, and even a tad mean. More than anything, it could apply some extra shortcuts, both on the road and in the garage, to keep its qualities front and center without sinking. Compared to something like Forever Skies – a similar core concept in a different shape – its loop feels overly stretched and lacks a self-propelling momentum.
For example, let me tell you about repair putty. After every trip to the wasteland, your car usually comes back in a terrible state, and the basic solution is this common crafting item. But one of the ingredients of repair putty is chemicals, and chemicals are not at all common. There is a self-renewing supply of other raw materials—metal, rubber, wiring—surrounding your workshop, ensuring that you can craft the necessary things, but there is no supply of chemicals, so you often have to build fresh doors for your vehicle rather than repair the ones you have. Then, once you get your hands on the putty, it is incredibly sluggish to apply. You stand in front of a panel or door. You hold down a button for a few seconds. You watch an animation of scraping and smearing. Move to the next surface of the bodywork. Repeat. The routine soon becomes as sparse as the supply of chemicals.
I generally like it when games recreate tiny manual processes, like the machine operations in Far: Lone Sails or the coffee-making in Mundaun. Here, too, I like the details, like turning the ignition key and shifting the gear from park to drive and back when the car stops (the car will drive away if you forget). But when tiny processes add up to spending 20 minutes getting ready for a trip, and the tinkering controls are too finicky, I lose interest. It’s even worse when you don’t return safely from a trip, like a dose of extra punishment, because you lose almost everything you’ve collected and then have to rebuild practically from scratch (thankfully, some assistance options can lend a hand reduce the tedium).
Spending time in the garage on Pacific Drive might be the perfect respite from a grueling journey if it was all about inventing fresh things and experimenting with settings, but in practice it’s more like going on vacation – double-checking that you’ve packed everything, filled up with gas, and asked the neighbor to feed the cat (OK, not the last one). Upgrades that actually make life easier or more fun, like a pulse that violently pushes sticky enemies away, require a ton of resources to design and build, and even then they can break, often limiting post-ride construction efforts to just slightly stronger panels and sturdier tires. You could spend an hour on the road only to have to put most of your effort into getting your car back to its pre-departure condition.
That hour or two of travel is also a bit much, especially since there’s no way to even save and exit once you’re there. Few maps are quick to traverse, and if you want to return well-stocked, you’ll often find yourself parking to feed yourself, and if you want to stay fit, you’ll detour around the most threatening hazards. While the layouts of the locations change every time you’re deep into the game and have to drive through four maps to reach the next key objective, there’s not enough variety to make the sights worth appreciating again. It’s even more irritating when you complete a distant objective but don’t make it to the teleportation beam in time and have to repeat the entire journey.
All of which is to say that while Pacific Drive has plenty of atmosphere, a powerfully engaging premise, and simulates the experience of driving a quirky elderly machine in admirable detail, it’s all wrapped up in a laborious frame. Despite all those “Get out of the way!” moments, the processes of collecting, creating, and progressing through the story are full of annoying holes and diversions. For all the repetition of mundane tasks, I imagine it’s closer to the reality of being in the military than that elderly ad.
This review is based on a test version of the game provided by publisher Kepler Interactive.
