With sincere apologies to the Magnum Opus from Mad Max, the Saud Kruger Orca passenger liner from Elite Dangerous and Arthur Morgan’s horse, I have a new favorite ride: the station wagon in Pacific Drive. It’s amazing.
It didn’t look like much at first: just a typical late ’80s family wagon with wood paneling and a hatchback trunk. But over the course of the last 35 hours I’ve turned it into an armor-plated, radiation-resistant tank positively bristling with sci-fi gadgets. And it’s only a little bit haunted.
Those upgrades (and the ghosts in the shell) are the result of barreling through a hellscape of nightmarish weather, crumbling roads, and more horrifying anomalies per square mile than the entire STALKER trilogy combined. Pacific Drive, the debut game from developer Ironwood Studios, is a first-person driving survival game in which you explore a spooky and deadly exclusion zone to gather the resources you need to soup up your ride.
I’m declaring it right now: the station is one of the best vehicles in videogames, ever. Unfortunately you have to spend a lot of time leaving it behind to run around on foot, and that’s where the game falters a bit. But when you’re roaring through the hostile world in that glorious, ridiculous wagon, puts an exciting and fresh new spin (ha ha, because tires) on the survival genre.
