Genre-blending has been the secret sauce for tons of developers in the 2020s so far. It’s great to see such creativity bring about games that could have never existed before, especially after the 2010s brought about a certain monotony in its best-selling titles. In the case of Pacific Drive, its selling point is having to survive while driving through a supernatural onslaught. Trailers have dazzled and secured intrigue from thousands of gamers, but its lofty ambitions have a lot to live up to. Does this survival driving simulator have what it takes to deliver on its promises?

Straight from the get-go, Pacific Drive delivers a lot in the department of presentation. The murky, torrential downpour as the radio plays some hard rock sets a tone instantaneously, as the mysterious threat is front and center in its prologue. Once you come to terms with that, the game eases you into a tutorial. Some portions of it are ham-fisted and drawn out, but you also come away with a profound understanding of what it takes to maintain your car, repair it, craft, and scavenge amidst the dangers of the Zone that you’re trapped in. Siphoning fuel, scrapping broken-down cars, and replacing tires is just scratching the surface of what’s needed.

The biggest issue within Pacific Drive is that you spend more time outside of your car than braving the storm within it. The game’s obsession with looting and finding specific materials derails it from the very start of your run, where I had to consult a guide in an embarrassingly quick amount of time just to locate gears in the very first task post-tutorial. For an adventure game to hit the brakes so frequently and expeditiously detracts from the sense of journey really leaves a bad taste in your mouth in no time. It just doesn’t feel like the intensity of the trailers that got me hyped for the game.

Performance on an ultrawide monitor is grim within Pacific Drive. The zoomed-in feeling makes navigating a real pain when you have autonomous control of the vehicle and your first-person camera. Frame rates are also shockingly low even with high-end hardware, as I struggled around 30 frames-per-second despite far exceeding the recommended specs. Past this, having to listen to cumbersome dialogue that you take no part in, as well as grinding again and again for materials, makes for an experience that is more frustration than it is explorative and pulse-pounding as it was advertised.

There’s certainly an audience for Pacific Drive if they are patient enough and can subvert their expectations from how the game appears on a store page. I came away from it wanting to experience half of the excitement shown in the trailer below, but the bulk of the playtime resulting in looking around for items on foot and just making it to the next scavenge point was a detriment. If Pacific Drive laid back on that and had a mode that was more driving-centric, this game would be fantastic, but as is, it’s hard to recommend Pacific Drive.

A PC review copy of Pacific Drive was provided by Kepler Interactive for the purposes of this review.

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Pacific Drive

$29.99

5

Score

5.0/10

Pros

• Nice Worldbuilding
• Succinct Driving

Cons

• Poor Ultrawide Support
• Wandering/Crafting is a Slog
• Too Much Stopping