There's a lot to be said for that chunky shoebox-on-wheels aesthetic that late 70s / early 80s American Station Wagons have. Built like tanks, able to carry the entire family and all their junk to the beach or the mountains, those good ol' rustbuckets brought up a generation, and even as a scaley limey I have always secretly wanted one.
I guess the next best thing is playing Pacific Drive - a new survival horror game from Ironwood Studios / Kepler Interactive. It's one of the few games I've bought purely based on the trailer, reviews unseen, purely because of that central character - and let's face it, the car is what this game is all about - your faceless protagonist not so much.
All you know is that you've somehow ended up dragged into "The Olympic Zone" - a mysterious tainted landscape somewhere in the backwoods of America. Surrounded by a colossal wall, and riddled with mysterious rifts, this place has absolutely nothing to do with field sports and everything to do with just staying alive.
Thankfully you find an abandoned wreck of a station wagon fairly early on in your quest. Guided by a couple of mysterious 'benefactors' via a radio, and a mad scientist who uses her innate engineering and electronic skills to keep your ride in tip-top condition, you're ready to try and find a way to escape this hellzone.
In most survival games you'll find yourself chipping away at trees and rocks to build shelters. In Pacific Drive your focus is on keeping your car running, because when you're inside your car you're (relatively) protected from the weirdness outside. Strange rifts will turn you into scrambled eggs if you linger too long in them. Bizarre outcrops of rock and tarmac jut out of the landscape, quite often right under your car if you're not paying attention.
Littered throughout the landscape are other wrecked vehicles ripe for scavenging, and a rich crafting model that lets you build new tools and devices to break into the various abandoned buildings in the zone to search for food, resources and other goodies left behind. Above all though you'll spend a lot of time slathering repair putty on your poor battered vehicle, or working out where to source materials to build new detectors and enhancements to keep you out of the more dangerous bits of the zone.
The game has been called "Clunky" by a few, and certainly it's an exercise in working out how to do things that we take for granted in other games. Just getting in your car can be a bit of a chore (I have no idea why I kept pressing the 'triangle' button, I guess it's the universal standard and my brain won't rewire), or why the developers thought it would be fun to make you start the car and put it in drive / turn off the ignition and put it in park each and every time you need to get out, but there are a wealth of tweaks and options in the settings menu for the game so you can always fiddle with those to make your experience a bit less cumbersome.
One thing I'd have liked would have been an external camera option for the car. Dashboard views are all well and good but I rarely use them in racing games, and it felt annoyingly claustrophobic to be forced to use them in a game where being able to see the gorgeous scenery more easily would've been a distinct advantage.
Performance on the PS5 wasn't as smooth as I was expecting either, it's certainly no 60FPS beast, and there are no options to choose between visual splendour or high frame rates, but after a while (once you've turned off the dreadful motion blur) you start to get used to it. In fact it really does look as good as the screenshot above when you're tootling around.
I had one crack at the first scouting mission to nab some gear for a radio transmitter, and abjectly failed to understand the game map, or where the hell I was supposed to head once I'd scavenged all the bits I need - even the map legends didn't help, so better map / checkpointing would've been nice.
All that said, this is a game with a ton of atmosphere, and after a while you start to develop a weird bond with your car to the point where you get genuinely upset if you can't fix 'er up, and get rolling. It's a tough game but one that's got a surprising amount of depth to it. It's always a good sign when you've been playing a game all evening and start dreaming about the blimmin' thing once you go to bed.
Overall, this is one of the most original survival games in a long time. Whether it manages to bring in variety and uniqueness as the story unfolds remains to be seen as I only got to play it for about 3 hours, but from what I've seen so far, this is definitely something special, and a real bargain at 24.99 compared to some of the disappointing 70 quid plus games we've seen of late.
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