Pacific Drive - Ishvii Reviews

Pacific Drive is a rogue-lite disguised as a sci-fi driving game. While it is visually striking and has an excellent opening few hours, it suffers from the same problem I have with basically all rogue-lites; it's a 2 hour game stretched over 40+ to save on dev costs. QA is very high, lightning and visuals are excellent, driving is immersive... but the game loop of going on identical drives to scavenge resources gets stale after 5-10 hours. They've done an excellent job with the car though; interacting with it is very tactile and it really is the star of the game. Ultimately it was a DNF for me after 20 hours though as I had no drive to keep looting the same containers over and over.

It's difficult to score a game that does so many things right, but is ultimately boring. So 2/5 for the gameloop, 5/5 for the actual mechanics. I'd recommend trying it out on heavy sale, but imagine that many people won't finish the story. It would have been way better as a single player full length campaign. That being said, the developers should still be applauded for making something different and unique that's very highly polished.

Pros

The immersion of driving and interactive with the car is very very well done. Everything about it is tactile and feels like it exists in the world. When you get in, you need to open the door, turn the key, and put the gearstick in drive mode. The headlights drain the battery. You can leave the engine running but put the handbrake on if you're just getting out. which continues to use fuel
Great tutorial that teaches you to play the game through the story rather than just a list to read
The car is composed all out of separate parts (bonnet, engine, battery etc) and can all be picked up, moved, fixed, refilled etc which is very immersive
Rain stays on the windscreen and the wipers help
Graphically it's visually striking
Tons of accessibility options
Really good voice acting
Each individual part of the car changes appearances dynamically as it gets damaged and repaired
Inventory management on the whole isn't too much of a chore. You have backpack which has compartments. Items which overlap the compartment boundaries are at "risk of being lost". Large objects you can only hold in your hands, like car doors, tyres and installation kits.
Simple locks can just be smashed with an impact hammer or broken with a prybar
You can crafting using items in your backpack or car, or in the garage storage if you're at the garage
As there are no "enemies" (there are no weapons), obstacles are a lot more interesting - things that stick to your car and make it go haywire, or very strong winds, or big flying bots that pick up your car and dump it somewhere if they spot you
The use of crash dummies as obstacles is very clever - using human outlines makes it really creepy, but without turning into a horror game
You lose health if you close the boot on your own head
Over time, your car can develop "quirks", which you can fix with a specific machine. This means you need to work out what happens and when, such as "the bonnet opens when you reverse", or "the radio changes stations when you turn right". By default these only happen occasionally, which makes them almost impossible to diagnose - but there's a gameplay option to make them happen all the time (which also makes them more dangerous)
I didn't like the game not pausing when you're in menus - there's an option to make it pause though
I don't like games where you can lose an hour's progress for failing the "run" - there's an option to keep your items though
There's a day/night cycle. Nights are VERY dark, and there's an option to make them shorter
I didn't like that you had to put down the car part you're holding while taking the old one off to replace it - there's an option for that.
I don't like having to hold the interact button to turn the engine on/off or the parking brake - there's an option to make it instant
There are SO MANY options to make the game play your way
The "satnav" is a computer monitor that sits in the passenger seat - which means if you want to know where you're going, you have to keep looking away from the road to check it. Annoying, but more immersive than a minimap

Cons

The biggest downside, and it's a big one, is that the gameplay loop is extremely repetitive. You've seen pretty much everything after 5 hours, and after that it's just a grind
To go to new locations, you have to drive through all the old ones every time. So the longer the game goes on, the more you have to just retreat the exact same environments over and over again
When you first unlock cosmetics, the only things available are 22 different "gender flags"
It's pretty confusing to work out how to use the Tinker station; it could do with a tutorial.
Looting the same 5 kinds of containers in the same 5 identical buildings gets old quickly
The mad dash to the gateway at the end of every run feels very contrived. 1, I hate anything where you can lose an 1-2 hours of progress. 2, The game forces you to be a certain distance away from the gateway before you activate it, so no matter how well each run has gone, there's always a huge risk at the end of it (unless you turn off losing items on a failed run, which I did)
When you get back to the garage at the end of each run, you have to move all the stuff you collected into storage, which is clunky because the garage has about 7 different storage containers, and none of them are connected to each other - so you have to go around trying to find space in each one to stash things
The upgrades never really feel like upgrades.. they just make you feel numerically like you suck less, which doesn't feel worth it

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