Pacific Drive [Review]
Ironwood Studios’ roguelite driving survival game owes a lot to Subnautica but stands on its own.
Image credit: Ironwood Studios / Kepler Interactive
I thought crafting and survival games weren’t for me. Then I played Subnautica and its sequel and fell in love. I’ve been looking for a comparable game ever since, one that captured the style of survival gameplay along with the foreboding, mysterious atmospheric exploration. I finally found that game, and it’s Ironwood Studios’ Pacific Drive.
Pacific Drive takes place in 1998 in the long abandoned Olympic Exclusion Zone, a scientific research site in the Pacific Northwest shut down under highly classified circumstances many years before. You venture too close to the walls and are teleported in, arriving next to an old station wagon that seems to be the only working car in the Zone. Guided by voices on the car’s radio, you settle in an abandoned garage, your base of operations on your quest to find a way out.
Image credit: Ironwood Studios / Kepler Interactive
Unfortunately, you have no transmitter, so you can’t talk back to the people helping you: Oppy, Francis, and Tobias, two scientists and a technician who stayed behind when the Zone was evacuated, transmitting from safe locations unknown to you. These three excellently voiced characters and their relationships form the backbone of the game’s narrative. A lot of backstory is provided through the game’s many, many scannable objects and abandoned journal entries, all organized in your handy and very fun to read database.
Your station wagon, a key tool to your protection and survival in the hazardous Zone, is a Remnant. Remnants, Tobias and Francis explain, are everyday objects, with strange characteristics and powers, that appear for unknown reasons in the Zone and become bound to the person that discovers them. A Remnant creates a strong hold over its owner, making them increasingly obsessed with it to the point of slowly going insane. I love this bit of lore and how it ties so well into the game’s mechanics.
Image credit: Ironwood Studios / Kepler Interactive
As Oppy and the others tell you, you’ve got to venture into the Zone to gather resources to upgrade and repair your station wagon, upgrade and add facilities to your garage base, and help the scientists investigate the nature of your car and provide you a way to escape. This is where the core gameplay loop begins.
Using a map in the garage, you plan out a route to your destination. Each destination is a Junction with exits out to more Junctions. When you start out, Junctions are one step from the garage, but each time you complete a trip to the Junction at the end of your route and return to the garage, new paths will open from the ending destination out to additional Junctions, filling out the map of the Zone. Conditions, resources, and dangers are randomized for each Junction at the start of your run, as one of the peculiarities of the Zone is that it unpredictably reshapes reality.
Image credit: Sam Kahn / Ironwood Studios / Kepler Interactive
Exploring the Zone’s Junctions is dangerous business. You’ve got to negotiate many hazards. Strange Aberrations inhabit the zone—inorganic creatures, weird mists or energy fields, and hostile geological phenomena—all out to destroy your car and you. On top of this, you’ve got harsh weather, inexplicable darkness, corrosive acid storms, and more to deal with. These range from mildly irritating to supremely dangerous. Despite the danger, the areas you explore are beautiful, even the deepest parts of the Zone with their devastated, bombed out, charred look. The outer ring of the Zone is covered with lush northwestern forests, while the next layer in is covered by alien-looking swamps.
At each Junction, you’ll scavenge for materials using the tools at your disposal. Early tools include a crowbar, a buzzsaw-like Scrapper, and a concussive Impact Hammer. You strip abandoned cars, break into abandoned field labs and shacks, and gather the Zone’s alien natural resources. The game lets you research and build new tools later; my favorite is a vacuum that sucks up loose items. Most importantly, when you’re exploring, you’ve got to find energy cores. The energy from these cores fuels the device in your car that allows you to return to the garage, and you’ll use the leftovers to conduct your research on new crafting recipes.
Image credit: Ironwood Studios / Kepler Interactive
You can’t spend forever at each of your stops. Eventually, the anomalous storms that periodically reshape the Zone begin to manifest, and if you don’t get out in time, either the increased radiation will kill you or you’ll be wiped out existence. You’ve either got to take the exit that leads to the next Junction, or summon a gateway using your gathered energy. Summoning the gateway creates a portal seen as a pillar of light and greatly accelerates the coming of the storm, so you’ve got to drive as fast as possible to that gateway. The further you are into the Zone, the further you have to be from the point on the map where you activate the gate. These frantic drives to the exit are one of the biggest highlights of the game; you’ve got to drive your clunker fast, and not always on roads. Late in the game, hazards like huge obelisks will begin to fall from the sky, making for some memorable cinematic moments as you swerve while mashing down on the gas pedal to survive.
Driving through the Zone feels great, whether on asphalt, dirt, mud, or on roads slick from torrential rain. Of course, the car’s handling isn’t great because it’s a station wagon, but you learn to drive it like a badass quickly. Soon you add things like more powerful engines and off-road tires to improve handling and speed. You’ll also need to use windshield wipers to clear your view and your headlights to navigate dense fog or darkness.
Image credit: Sam Kahn / Ironwood Studios / Kepler Interactive
My favorite detail about the game is how you control and interact with the controls inside the car. While there are button shortcuts for wipers and lights, you’ve got to look at and interact with the ignition and shifter. Turning the ignition or engaging the parking break takes time, a realistic detail that adds a lot to the overall feel of the game. The best of these interactions is the map. The map of the Junction is a screen that takes up the passenger seat, so to check your map you’ve got to look to the right and away from the road. Realism doesn’t always add to the fun of a game, but in this case the friction realism creates is wonderful, especially as you’re frantically driving out of control to make it to an exit gateway in time.
Whether you die or make it out through a gateway, the car will always take you back to the garage. You can then use your gathered energy to research new tools, upgrades, and modifications for the car. As the obsessive relationship to a Remnant dictates, you’ll spend a lot of time tinkering with the car, whether you’re fixing it or upgrading it.
Image credit: Sam Kahn / Ironwood Studios / Kepler Interactive
Maintaining the car is important because if it fails it can’t protect you. It has five doors including the trunk, five panels including the hood, two bumpers, four tires, and two headlights. Each of these can fail independently or be replaced freely with upgraded versions. It always feels rewarding to modify the car, with satisfying sound effects and visual changes to each part. You can also change the paint job and decals for all the car body parts to create your own look. I spent a lot of time in the garage.
As you research improvements, you can add mount points to the sides and roof of the car to attach extra storage, lights, gas tanks, batteries, and more. These mods let you survive longer runs, and the level of customization you can apply using your limited car slots to make a build that works for you is impressive. I spent most of the game with hydro battery rechargers mounted on the side because of how often it rains. I added a backseat gas tank and battery, tons of extra storage, and a rooftop resource-finding antenna. Some of the more expensive additions, such as Olympium armored parts, I never built because they aren’t necessary to finish the game and the resources required are tedious to farm. This is a negative aspect of the game—it doesn’t provide enough motivation to fully upgrade.
Finally, you can use your garage workbench to craft tools and repair kits you need to head back out and patch up your car on the road. Then it’s back to the map and off to the interior of the Zone again, restarting the cycle.
Image credit: Sam Kahn / Ironwood Studios / Kepler Interactive
The way the exploration is structured is something that makes the game become a little tedious with repetition. Every time you want to explore a deep part of the Zone, you’ve got to drive through all the Junctions on the roads leading to it, usually exploring each stop for energy and parts as you go. I could easily spend a couple of hours on a single run. It made sense to maximize my time out without returning to the garage because rushing to a gateway exit will usually do a ton of damage to the car, so I wanted to make the most of it to get the right amount of resources to make the repairs worthwhile and make better parts. The randomization doesn’t provide enough of a difference to each Junction to make its repeated exploration interesting.
Without divulging spoilers, I’ll say that I wasn’t a fan of the game’s ending mission. No matter the type of ending an author chooses, it should be satisfying in its own way, and this one is not, particularly after playing the game for 30 or so hours.
Pacific Drive does a great job of contextualizing tinkering with the car as the obsession that Remnants create in their owners. However, the flip side of that coin is that Remnants drive their owners insane and that’s not manifested in the gameplay or visuals at all; that’s the game’s biggest missed opportunity. This is especially true considering that the game explains that one of the reasons you can’t leave is because the Remnant station wagon would bring you right back to the Zone because of its connection to you. The game should have gone deeper into this relationship.
Image credit: Ironwood Studios / Kepler Interactive
I played the game on PS5, so I can’t speak to the PC version, but Pacific Drive has some optimization issues that lead to significant framerate dips depending on what’s onscreen. The framerate sometimes gets low enough during especially frantic moments that it’ll affect gameplay. The issue doesn’t happen enough to make the game feel bad to play, but it’s annoying. Despite playing after the game has been patched, I also encountered a really irritating bug that would make my equipped tools cycle endlessly when getting out of the car in the right conditions. I could only fix this by exiting to the main menu, which leads to restarting the current Junction.
While it’s not perfect, Pacific Drive is almost exactly what I needed to scratch that itch that Subnautica gave me, while also making itself distinct with its roguelite elements, tone, visuals, and feel. The Olympic Exclusion Zone feels like what might happen after a disaster in Tales from the Loop and is an enthralling vision of a retro future. I’d love for Ironwood Studios to return to this world in some way in the future.
Pacific Drive is available now for PC via Steam or Epic, and for Playstation 5.
