Pacific Drive Critic Reviews

Pacific Drive offers a thrilling and unique experience that seamlessly blends the excitement of a road trip with the terror of the supernatural. The game quickly won me over, just as it’s sure to win over the imagination and thrill of players who give the game a much-deserved try.

Pacific Drive is a mystery that draws you in little by little and rewards you for staying dedicated with both a better vehicle and more ridiculous threats. Every excursion left me wondering just what I’d discover, both from survival and story standpoints, as well as what kind of crazy threats were going to try to make my life harder. Fun and interesting characters and a pretty great soundtrack help to keep things fun, but maintaining the station wagon is easily the most compelling part. It’s your best friend through thick and thin, even if it’s trying to eat your mind. That can be somewhat forgiven since it makes up the core of an ultimately great rogue-lite survival game.

Pacific Drive offers a road trip like no other, boasting immaculate sound design and a classic '90s conspiracy delivered through a compact survival-crafting roguelike loop.

Olympic Peninsula and its Exclusion Zone have hidden many secrets for more then three decades and now, after I got pulled in by a mysterious anomaly, it is finally time to reveal them all! But this is no happy tale of a handsome protagonist, but a mere mortal driver’s storyline, which wiggles and twists around a postapocalyptic wasteland. And what better tool to navigate it than a sturdy vehicle, armored with the knowledge of brilliant scientists and quirky tech, that will surely protect me from the horrors of this dystopian world…

Pacific Drive thoughtfully translates simple yet overlooked human aspects through an experience that is truly unique and unforgettable.

When you get down to it, Pacific Drive is a quietly brilliant game. There's nothing that comes to mind that is like it, and it's an outwardly simple concept that also has a variety of layers. While out on a run, you deftly drive around anomalies and sometimes escape a junction with a tattered car by the skin of your teeth. Other times, you're outfitting your car in the garage while the jukebox is playing, carefully considering what to bring with you and which parts you should have on the car. This game is exactly what I had hoped it would be when I initially heard about it, and it's been a long time since I've played something so boldly different.

A novel and challenging survival game that puts you in the driver's seat of one the best cars in videogames.

Courage should be rewarded, always. And Pacific Drive is a brave game, offering unique gameplay focused on the exploration of the Zone and the relationship between man and vehicle. We will feel helpless and powerless most of the time, banking on car upgrades to have any hope of surviving in this bleak and hostile environment. The action is slow paced as the protagonist is not an Invincible Super Soldier but an ordinary man in his beat-up car, and this may turn away some fans of driving games, but the high point of this production is the story.

Pacific Drive so skillfully combines different, basic gameplay mechanics borrowed from other games, and mixes them with amazing atmosphere, that the end-result is a really fresh, original (and difficult!) survival horror.

Pacific Drive is like a road trip: It requires a lot of preparation and planning, but the journey is always worth the experience. Just watch out for the radiation.

Pacific Drive is a fantastic survival game with an addictive gameplay loop that involves forging deep connections to junctions, progressing deeper into an ever-changing Zone, upgrading a quirky vehicle, and navigating through challenges that appear on the road ahead.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. has made Roadside Picnic famous, but it harshly mangled the book: S.T.A.L.K.E.R.’s Zone was a zone of armed conflict between various factions and mutants, instead of being a place of mystery and supernatural. Pacific Drive, on the other hand, pays an unexpected tribute to the “feel” of the original book, despite nominally being “a car-driving game”.

With its wonderful depth in both story and gameplay, Pacific Drive is an early hit in 2024. It sets out to create a world that fits comfortably in the New Weird genre but brings its own style and substance to it. The road from unreliable bucket of bolts to souped-up charger is a fascinating one whether you're unraveling the game's many mysteries or improving your wagon for its next road trip. Though the game can be especially hard to decipher, difficulty options help to counter some of its more overwhelming aspects. I'll stick to bikes in my day-to-day life through the actual northwest, but in Pacific Drive, I'm up for another joy ride through one hell of a winding road.

A punishing, exhasperating slog, or an off-beat love story between driver and car, human and the Zone? Pacific Drive is both and then some.

Ironwood Studios' debut game accomplishes to be an immersive survival driving adventure. Its intense treks through mind-bending obstacles are balanced with humor and relaxing moments provided by crafting and upgrading useful tools and car components, along with Pacific Drive's catchy alternative rock soundtrack. It's an incredibly impressive debut game that should put the new studio on the map: "there's no peace of mind or place you'll see, like riding on Pacific Drive."

Pacific Drive is a superb survival game, with stunning landscapes and crafting tools that will see you painstakingly tweaking everything to perfection. With a ton of dangerous anomalies and an unpredictable environment, it’s just as stressful as it is fun.

Pacific Drive is a title that exudes passion from every exhaust pipe, and we can only be happy for Ironwood Studios and the love placed in their debut work. It is a game with a solid and well-tested design, but not always as functional as it should. Our advice is not to give up on boarding the station wagon: you might discover that getting lost in the meanders of the Area can have its positive sides and, considering the price of the ticket, you might as well take a tour.

Pacific Drive is a single-player survival game with a gripping atmosphere, ideal for fans of titles like Subnautica. We wouldn't have minded a little more storytelling at the end, so if any DLC comes along, we'll take it!

Pacific Drive is a meticulous game that asks the player to perform a lot of tasks to deal with its many exploration, survival, crafting and customization systems. Offering a rich universe filled with questions and kind of a macabre awe that is definitely unique among many survival games that end up bringing the same chassis with a different skin, the Ironwood Studio game is a gem.

While the story can be confusing, Pacific Drive shines in terms of immersion. It manages to transport you to a unique atmosphere of loneliness, melancholy and nostalgia, bringing back memories of classic TV shows and movies from the 90s.