Pacific Drive

Steam Reviews

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• Recommended Posted January 3, 2026 on Steam thought this was a chill driving game. the car is screaming, the forest is screaming, i am screaming
• Recommended Posted November 9, 2025 on Steam STALKCAR. My Summer Zone. Escape From Carkov. Roadtrip Picnic. Play it already.
• Recommended Posted November 21, 2025 on Steam 90% of the time, it's a relaxing game about driving through a mysterious stalker-style anomoly zone. The vibes are heckin cozy, the scenery is beautiful, the radio is playing, and everything just feels nice. 9% of the time you're on the edge of your seat, trying to desprately protect the one thing that keeps you protected from the dangers of the zone. Maybe you'll be trying to get up/down a steep hill without sliding and crashing, maybe you'll be desprately trying to stop your damaged car from falling apart completely while carefully rationing your limited resources; and maybe you'll be trying to escape an anomoly without crashing into a tree, or worse, another anomoly. 1% of the time your car will somehow be several dozen meters up in the air, flying at 80mph, completely out of control, and that will be the least of your concerns.
• Not recommended Posted April 16, 2026 on Steam This could have been a really unique and absorbing experience. Instead, this is a game that quite literally fences itself in, squandering the potential of its setting and gameplay premise. It starts off very strong, with a strange anomalous wasteland to explore in your 1980s-era station wagon. The driving feels solid, the environments are eery and the freedom of disembarking on foot at any point to inspect roadside curiosities draws you in immediately. You start of as an explorer, but you are quickly reduced to a survivor with a barely functional husk of a vehicle, the sole mission being to get out alive. Your HUD is the car dashboard that you interact with directly by looking around. An atmospheric survival-crafting open-world roadtrip, awesome! Gradually however, that sense of immersive freedom and intrigue is taken away. You are treated to humdrum over-the-radio exposition dumps with lots of Capitalised sci-fi-fantasy names for random things and occurrences. The overwrought genericism erodes all sense of mystery and apprehension about the world, since there isn't any environmental or emergent storytelling. The simple diegetic interface of the car's dashboard and the moody soundtrack along with the well-realized climate system get increasingly plastered over by lifeless text, lines, meters and checkboxes. Very soon, the gameplay bait-and-switch becomes evident: you are not driving through a continous landscape with foreboding dangers and incremental opportunities, making your way to safety with only your wits and gumption to rely on. Rather, you teleport to small mission areas from a hub world which are completed by opening another portal to teleport back. Every 10 seconds of driving necessitates getting out and blasting through one of a few template structures or encounters to hoover up resources by spamming E. Those are then juggled around in a myriad of restrictive menu screens, to repair and replace constantly degrading MacGuffins. It feels like they could have skipped the car theme altogether, since this is really just a derivative craft-a-thon with all the common pitfalls of tedious and disjointed inventory slot management. Following minimap icons ends up becoming more important than navigating the world in 3D. Increasingly scattered rare drops and convoluted upgrades are needed to progress, requiring grindy resource-mining sessions. Ultimately it feels like most of the time is spent clicking around in drab menu screens, not going on an actual roadtrip. EDIT: improved grammar, shortened sections.
• Recommended Posted January 10, 2026 on Steam 8/10 *smacks Devs with rolled up news paper* Bad Devs, auto-saves should never overwrite manual saves. Be aware to always have two saves, this game will *uck you and overwrite your save. The game is pretty decent and fun, just infuriated to find that it overwrites your manual saves which is just dumb.
• Not recommended Posted October 6, 2025 on Steam "I guess we're walking some more..." Pacific Drive boasts a really neat concept at first glance: a lonesome road trip through the haunted roads of a mysterious walled-off exclusion zone, where the player must evaluate their routes, scavenge for supplies and maintain their vehicle in order to achieve their goals and escape. But once the game gets going the reality of what this game offers turns out to be something rather different. Pacific Drives gameplay quickly boils down into a fairly short and repetitive cycle. You spend an inordinately long time fixing up and maintaining your car in a garage, then drive off. You then drive for a distance so short you'd probably have made it faster on foot before having to dismount to explore and collect stuff, then hop into the car again, drive another short hop and repeat, repeat, repeat. The act of turning the engine off, putting on the parking brake, opening the door, exiting the car, closing the door and doing all that again in reverse order is what most of the time in this game seems to be made up of. It gets tedious quickly and the rewards gained don't really make it all feel worthwhile. The game tries to spice up its gameplay with obstacles and anomalies, unpredictable dangers to the players progress, but these also become known, repetitive and dull very quickly as it becomes clear the challenges are quite static and easily avoided. Sure, you'll get zapped or bumped from time to time to ensure you'll need to repair your car or replace a part, but it never really felt truly threatening as the difficulty level seems quite low by default. Story and character mostly come via radio conversations you get to listen in on as the silent protagonist. Scientists who chose to stay inside the walled off Zone ramble off technobabble, bicker and argue and act shocked and surprised at every point of story progression, but their lack of direct involvement in anything makes what story and drama there is feel distant and hollow, the characters forced stereotypes crafted to fill out base archetypes. While I did complete the game, it left me feeling quite disappointed and exhausted, and I can't really recommend Pacific Drive in the end. The game never cashes in the promise of a haunted road trip, but instead turns a fairly basic scavenging game into a tedious hassle with the inclusion of a car that feel unnecessary and tacked on, rather than feeling like the glorious centerpiece it should have been. Playtime: 18+ hours (A single playthrough) Ratings (1-10) Visual: 8 Audio: 7 Story: 4 Gameplay: 5 Overall: 5