I bought Pacific Drive on release and put in about 12 hours before I had enough. Conceptually, it was really good. A great setting (sci-fi anomalies), solid art, exploration, rogue-like, and a good story. There were issues with the details. You couldn’t functionally save mid-run, and runs took upwards of 45 minutes. Death was a complete wipe of that time. Even a successful run had you spending nearly half your resources repairing and preparing for the next run. I put it on the shelf with a promise to return when it got the QoL patches I needed.

Well the good news is that the game got a ton of patches, most of them a while ago. There are now multiple difficulty multipliers, from effectively a tourist mode to iron man. You can toggle a ton of options along the way.

I opted for two changes, and that was for full repairs when returning to base and lower crafting requirements. It still required a lot of repairs in the field, and barely getting through a few runs. Saves happen between zones, meaning I only lost 10 minutes of progress, much more acceptable. The crafting material one seems simple, but you still need two dedicated runs to get the material needed for some items (coral is great example). All told, it still took about 25 hours to get through it all, so not like this was a full cake walk. Quite the opposite, plenty of times where I just simply died due to some random effect. Which reminds me…

In the base game, you could (and certainly would) acquire quirks through regular gameplay. A quirk is some random effect that can have a random cause. The simple stuff is like turning left and the wipers turn on. The bad stuff is more like you move forward and the car shuts down. Resolving a quirk was a guessing game, where you needed trial and error and a specific machine back in your garage to resolve. In my original playthrough, I tried this mini-game and didn’t find it enjoyable. The full repair setting means no more quirks (well, you’ll get them temporarily still), which means much cleaner runs.

I will say that having completed the game, and looking back, I realize that only 1 item is actually required to reach end game, and it’s an item given to you as part of the storyline. If you simply complete every task offered, you can pretty much speed run to the end. It will require some rather impressive driving skills and more in-mission repairs than I’d like, but 100% doable. For those looking for a rather ‘hard to kill me rig’ that doesn’t require end-zone farming:

• 4 off-road tires (cheap to make, works on everything)
• Armored doors, panels, bumper (dirt cheap and super effective)
• Rear bumper will be the quest item above, which should be active 100% of the time (blocks nearly all environmental effects, but drains battery)
• Roof rack + roof fuel tank (massive increase in overall fuel and integrated, so no need to fuel mid-mission)
• 2x side rack wind turbine battery chargers (cheap to make, works while driving, easily offsets battery drain item from above)
• Optional: roof rack resource scanner if you do plan on farming end-game materials. It is stupidly effective.

The end result is still an engrossing experience that is quite a bit different that what other games have on offer. With all those patches, you have even more flexibility as to what portions fit your specific gaming preferences as well. I think we were somewhat blessed in 2024 with smaller dev studios able to find space to showcase games like these. Well worth the pickup.