Pacific Drive Review – Refuelling The Roguelike Genre

I’m no stranger to the roguelike genre: work your way through something, grab some upgrades and goodies, perish, and get ready to try it all again. That’s the core gameplay loop, and so many games have found new and interesting ways to iterate on this formula, from Dead Cells’ combat to Hades’ storytelling to the card-based, deck-building Slay The Spire. Pacific Drive, as you may have guessed from the name alone, brings a car into the mix. Specifically, a trusty ol’ ‘70s station wagon.

A roguelike, survival-horror where your goal is to keep upgrading your car as you head out into the closed off Olympic Exclusion Zone in a surreal reimagining of the Pacific Northwest while you look for a way out might sound simple, but it is anything but. You maintain your vehicle, fix it and refuel on the go, bring along tools to access and explore long-abandoned buildings for loot, and make it back to your garage relatively intact before the environment starts getting too unstable. Things are already bad enough in the Zone, but when the stability crumbles, it crumbles.

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Pacific Drive Developers Chat About Forming A Connection With Your Car In An Eerie World

We chat to Richard Weschler and Alex Dracott about Pacific Drive and the connection you form with your trusty sidekick.

There are many sides to Pacific Drive. It’s a roguelike that sees you attempting runs – or drives – through increasingly dangerous locations, plagued with storms, supernatural happenings, and inexplicable anomalies that you can rarely fight, and will often need to avoid and resist, or desperately use the things at your disposal to put up a struggle. However, it’s also a survival game, requiring you to scavenge, upgrade, and build upon your car, which goes from a beat-up looking station wagon to a beat-up looking station wagon with a lot more duct tape and some fancy metal pieces, some of which light up. Ain’t that cool.

Fix Up That Car…

This turns the game into a mechanic simulator at times, and honestly, it’s incredible to witness the amount of detail and care that has been put into overseeing your car. With all of the customisation, persistent damage, and strange things that can happen to it, it’s only amplified in the ways you’ll look after it. If anything, you’ll come to care for it and the metal chassis that saves you from purgatory time and time again.

I spent time fitting it with new wheels, I painted it different colours, added some decals, and even placed a little bee hood ornament. I love my bee.

But there are also quirks, wherein the car will develop malfunctions. To fix these, you first have to identify the issue, which means using the terminal in your garage to diagnose the problem. Sometimes it’s simple, like the car putting the handbrake on when you turn right, but other times it won’t be so obvious.

I spent hours in the garage working away on my now beloved car, and so taking it out into the Zone to find the route forward or to gather materials up the stakes. In most games, we don’t care about ourselves because we respawn, and usually the inventory is the only thing on the line. But my car? The thing I’ve worked so hard on? I don’t want anything to happen to it, but I have to accept that it will suffer.

…Like Your Life Depends On It

The survival roguelike nature of the gameplay loop also doesn’t hold back. Using a map in your garage, routes you have previously explored are highlighted, along with new paths you can choose. Of course, each area changes even if you take the exact same route twice, using procedural generation to create some truly beautiful but fresh locations, so it’s more a choice of direction you’re going in – are you exploring the region, or trying to head deeper into the Zone?

After navigating a location, a red cloud of instability forms, meaning if you go back there a second time so soon, things are much more dangerous. I was curious about what this would mean for exploration, but it basically takes the hazards you would expect, and ramps them up to 11. Expect a lot more chaos, and more parts to need fixing when and if you make it out alive.

The deeper you head into the Zone – which progresses the narrative – the more dangers you face. It feels like a good pace, because as soon as you become comfortable with the strange goings on, learn the hazards, and upgrade your car a bit, you head past the first wall into the mid-zone and… oh boy. This poor car.

Throughout the game, you keep radio contact with a few characters who are still living in the Zone. They each have their own reasons for sticking around after everyone else was evacuated, and you’ll learn all about them, their stories, and what exactly happened that was never disclosed to the outside world – all while they help you to find your way out.

The garage is your home base, safe from the instability, and with each run and each mission, the plot progresses and more of the story unfolds. You work with these characters and push further into the Zone to uncover the mystery at the heart of the story, with plenty of dangers along the way.

The only downsides are mild, but hard to ignore. The stakes are high, the locations are beautiful, and the dangers are plenty, but when you’re just out exploring, looking for basic materials – which, to keep your car in top shape, you will need to do from time to time – it can feel repetitive. A simple run is still quite risky, but it can make them a lot more work than you might want when you just need some chemicals or some duct tape to keep things ticking.

Performance can also be temperamental. On PC, these issues are less significant On PS5 though, performance hovers at a steady 30fps, but will sometimes dip lower depending on rain, particles, and big supernatural events. However, it can also have moments of increased performance, with some areas closer to 50-60fps, and even driving through tunnels feels like it almost hits 120fps. I’m not sure if it’s just uncapped and up to the will of the situation, but I feel like this game could and should easily be consistent on PS5, and I hope this is something that can be ironed out in future updates.

Pacific Drive takes each genre it tackles in a bold new direction, and creates something that’s not necessarily unheard of, but feels entirely unique in its design, care, and the way in which it pulls you into its world. You’ll immediately begin to care for your car as you keep it safe, and exploring the Zone consistently provides new, refreshing things to keep you engaged and daunted. Though the milder aspects can feel repetitive, it adds to a worthwhile experience that is absolutely worth playing.

Pacific Drive

Reviewed On PlayStation 5

Pros

• Refreshing take on the roguelike, survival-horror genres
• Enjoyable and in-depth car customisation and worthwhile upgrades
• Plenty of progression and increasing dangers, with excellent pacing

Cons

• It can be a little repetitive when doing simpler things
• Performance on PS5 is spotty