Pacific Drive's Next Fest demo has good mood but tedious survival scavenging

Today I'm all about discount deals and democracy manifest. Though discounts on it are scarce (beyond this 17% off one with the code OMEN17), Helldivers 2 still holds my attention like the vice-like pincers of a terminid warrior bug. Why? Because even in a squad of randos, you can experience heroic, heart-in-your-mouth moments like these.

When you get into your vehicle for the first time in Pacific Drive, it doesn’t feel any different than your average junker. Sure, it seems like it could fall apart any minute, but it somehow manages to stay mostly together… as long as you don’t run it into trees or through mysterious anomalies. It’s just an average car — until your friends on the radio start questioning how it exists at all. They say it should be impossible for a car to work in the Olympic Exclusion Zone, where the game takes place. The car also has some interesting characteristics: It’s able to take some technologically advanced upgrades like a champ, and despite being a 1950s station wagon, it can handle a paranormal storm with only minimal damage.

Having already played a preview build of Pacific Drive, I felt confident going into my playthrough for this review. I’d learned a lot about this ornery but captivating driving/survival/roguelite game in those few hours — knowledge I thought I could apply from the get-go. I thought I could just start optimizing my resource collection and applying my understanding of some of its arcane systems. I envisioned a smooth run through the early missions as I explored the crumbling, glitching reality of the Olympic Exclusion Zone in the Pacific Northwest, and gradually reinforced my shabby station wagon against the wild hazards of this irradiated wilderness.

Most developers focus on just one genre for their first title, but Ironwood Studios decided to create a fresh take on two for its debut game, Pacific Drive.

Ironwood Studios’ Pacific Drive is available now on PS5 and PC worldwide, offering a mix of realistic driving, survival and rogue-lite mechanics with a supernatural setting. Check out the launch trailer below.

Pacific Drive drops you into its Olympic Exclusion Zone, where things like physics don’t really work right anymore. The first objective or two will help you get acclimated, but you're left to figure out a lot of it on your own.

When I previewed Pacific Drive, the standout moment for me was when, in a novice moment, I found myself driving through the hellstorm of reality’s collapse. As my car fell apart around me and my health was about to hit 0%, I managed to make it to the gateway and got shunted back to the safety of the garage.

The lack of any big, swanky first-party exclusives for PS5 for the foreseeable future might be a concern for some, but the console is still set to receive plenty of notable exclusives over the coming months, several of which are coming from third-party developers. Pacific Drive is one such game. Ironwood Studios’ first-person driving survival game has looked increasingly promising with each new showing, but what exactly can PS5 players expect from the game in terms of how it will leverage the console’s hardware?

Regarding survival-themed titles, we’ve seen all the “scenarios” that you would traditionally find yourself within in that setting. Whether it be lost in a forest, trapped on an island, stuck in a mysterious building with untold horrors, etc. The concept is always the same: find things to help you survive and then get out. However, with the upcoming title Pacific Drive, it won’t be just you who’s trying to survive; it’s the station wagon you’re using to get out of the Pacific Northwest that you’re stuck in while chaos is raining down from all sides. So yeah, it’s not something you have to “deal with” every day.

We’ve all wondered why no one gets in a car and drives away from the terror in scary movies and games. Pacific Drive by Ironwood Studios lets us live out that scenario. This upcoming first-person survival adventure drives a customizable station wagon into the genre.

Pacific Drive's developers, Ironwood Studios, have shared a developer diary that reveals that its artstyle is based on a "twisting of the familiar" and leaving a distinct impression with a surreal world that's not too far from our own.

I respect a game with wild ambition. Declaring your game "the spiritual successor to Freelancer" is bold and ambitious, considering how the spaceship sim is still so beloved after 20 years that our readers voted it your 16th favourite space game of all time. This ambition is wild when the tiny development team is led by someone best known for replacing Skyrim's dragons with Thomas The Tank Engine. So while I'm not much of a spaceship sort, I had to check out the demo for Underspace, which aims to combine Freelancer shoot-o-trading space action with a dash of Lovecraftian horror.