izigame.me

Pacific Drive is not an easy one to review....
I could say PD is a rogue-lite driving sim with stage-based levels and world progression, with RPG elements, looting and has a narrative focus like Firewatch. Kind of like a mixture between Firewatch and My Summer Car.
Is it though? Ehhhh, we need to get into the details.
So, in Pacific Drive, you, a nameless driver, is cruising along a nice looking road in the woods, when suddenly, you get sucked into a vortex of some sorts. When you wake up, your car is in pieces, but you find another one in shambles, but working.
You hop on and you drive, until you start to hear the voices of different people who explain the basic gist of the situation. Essentially, you are near a "zone of exclusion" like in Chernobyl, and you need to cooperate with the people talking with you, the car, and the environment to get out of there and understand just what the heck is happening.
The first few hours you'll need to explore your surroundings, understanding what anomalies do and how to navigate the map, and that's when one of the first big positives came up to me: The car handles great. You can "feel" (even if using a keyboard like myself) the loss of traction and how every bump affects the handling. Braking feels a bit off, specially when driving fast (it's as if the front gets lighter and turns the car, which doesn't make sense), but I'm nitpicking. For a game that does not even attempt to be a sim, it handles far better than many racing games I've played.
As you keep on driving, possibly terrified of everything due to the amazing atmosphere the game generates, including sounds, you'll probably damage the car, be it because you forgot to put it in park and it rolled away, it was stolen, you dumped it into acid, crashed into a mine, got into a thunderstorm or just flew too high and landed hard.
Anyways, you gather up resources by disassembling wrecked cars, getting into abandoned houses and exploring, you need to gather up enough energy to warp back to your safe garage. This leads to an improvised race where you must find the most efficient way (be it the fastest, safest, most fun, etc) to it and floor it so as not to get destroyed by a radioactive storm. Even if you have the best gear or are an amazing driver, you are bound to make plenty of mistakes, or find yourself in very precarious situations because of this, which makes even the most rudimentary runs a joyride of trying to get to the warp point in time and in one piece.
When you finally make it, you'll find yourself back in your garage, where the scientists that were talking to you try to piece together what is happening and telling you what to do next. All the while you are fixing back your car, nurturing it and tuning it with different pieces. You'll find your car's quirks (small details that come up as you drive, like a car door opening when you go in reverse, or battery draining faster when the lights are off). You'll also plan your route for the next run; as you move forward, you'll realise that certain sections have different effects, like eerie darkness, storms, extra enemies, or constant stability (there is no time limit). This will be very useful as you explore, as it will help you make a path towards where you want to go (and FYI, if you want to move to a section up north, you need to go through all previous sections, hence the planning).
As you progress, the difficulty ramps up; you'll need to farm more materials to upgrade, and more runs to clear a path. Nearing the end game the requirements for farming get a bit ridiculous, specially considering that by then you have the driving down to an art and you'll put yourself in "dangerous" situations more often just for the heck of it (I did at least), but the game also commits a serious crime by dropping the ball narratively, in my opinion.
The game gets REALLY interesting narratively speaking, and while you don't really get a say on anything that's happening, you do feel a part of it. At one point in specific, something happens which is a rather emotional moment and is very well shown through the voicing (which btw, really sells you in on the story). After that though, it feels as though the game loses its gravitas, and it just doesn't have the same effect as you'd expected. The ending is.... also, rather bland, unfortunately.
So what else? Let's see:
-Graphics look very stylized, but the game does not run very well and needs a few optimization passes or turning down settings for it to run accordingly.
-Farming can get annoying, specially in the end-game.
-Story gets REALLY interesting, but then drops the ball hard late.
Played on:
Intel I7 12700k
32gb RAM 3200mhz
Tested on RTX 3070 Ti at 1440p
NVME Drive