HomeNewsPacific Drive
Pacific Drive’s Next Fest demo has good mood but tedious survival scavengingLove the mood, hate picking litter for crafting
Love the mood, hate picking litter for crafting
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/ Kepler Interactive
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/ Kepler Interactive
Pacific Drive - Surviving the Zone | Gameplay SummaryWatch on YouTube
Pacific Drive - Surviving the Zone | Gameplay Summary
Pacific Drive is set in an alternate timeline where a strange experiment in the 1940s saw a corner of Washington’s Olympic Peninsula overrun with strange and dangerous anomalies until the government it walled off. Now we end up trapped inside the Olympic Exclusion Zone and bonded with a supernatural station wagon. Off we go at the behest of voices on our radio to scavenge supplies, craft tools, craft new car parts, and keep the old banger running.
Big fan of fiddling with a radio |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/ Kepler Interactive
Don’t bump these boys |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/ Kepler Interactive
Unfortunately, the demo does a poor job of making the survival and roguelikelike elements interesting or appealing. Divorced from the structure of the wider game, where they should have more relevance, they’re just frustrating. Because you and the car naturally take damage as you search for the parts you need, you must also pick up and break down trash to craft healing items and parts, but scavenging results in damage, so you’ll need to craft healing items, so you’ll want crafting materials, so you’ll want to scavenge, but scavenging results in damage, so… and it’s just not fun or interesting to endlessly ransack cupboards and wrecks. No puzzles, no real challenges, just chores. But these chores are important because if you die, you’ll awaken in the garage and must restart the mission. It is a small mercy that you can find your car’s corpse and loot it, like aDark Soulsbloodstain stuffed full of scrap metal, but I’d rather just not.
A peek at the mission board at the end of the demo |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/ Kepler Interactive
This is only the demo, only the tutorial mission. After completing that, it does reveal the persistent progression systems to craft new gadgets and abilities for your car and yourself, even if you can’t play any more missions with them. Perhaps in the full game you’ll want to do optional supply runs to scavenge materials to craft better gear. That is the structure of survival games, after all, and I think this roguelikelike mission structure is mostly filling in for the absence of a single coherent open world. Perhaps those upgrades will be important, invaluable, as you face wilder hazards and anomalies. I do like the sound of that. I want to tear through the woods of the Pacific Northwest with a car covered in weird gadgets and a hellstorm whirling in my rearview. I want to see where the story goes. But I don’t want to spend hours picking litter to get there.
You can grab Pacific Drive’s Next Fest demoon Steam. Launching in full on the 22nd of February, Pacific Drive will also be soldon the Epic Games Store. It’ll cost £25/€30/$30.
The Steam Next Fest runs until the 12th of February, so grab the demo while you can. We’re playing heaps of Next Fest demos so hitour tagfor more recommendations.
