To survive in the looter-bomber Pacific Drive, you need to keep the paranormal station wagon you're driving around in tip-top shape. You're constantly repairing worn-out doors and replacing broken engine parts with cobbled-together tech. But maybe that's a bit too much tinkering. In our review , we praised the game for its “loads of atmosphere” but called the constant need to craft something “painful.” If that's how you felt, then good news. Developers Ironwood Studios say an update now lets you play around with the difficulty options generously, making the game easier and reducing crafting requirements altogether.
But… if you think otherwise, that the game isn't hard enough, you can now tick a box that will allow you to die by hitting yourself with a tailgate.
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Most of the changes are outlined in the trailer above and detailed in an update post on Steam , but to give you a rundown, there are now a bunch of new difficulty presets. For example, “Scenic Drive” lowers crafting requirements, making it impossible to die, while “Joyride” minimizes the dangers while maintaining the deadly threat, and says that “gathering, crafting, and research requirements have all been lowered.”
If you're currently yelling “NO, BANJAXED CARS ARE THE ENTIRE PURPOSE” then first of all, wow, relax. Secondly, this update also introduces some very challenging presets as a counterpoint. “Olympic Gauntlet” increases the difficulty of everything – hazards, crafting, car damage, you name it. “Iron Wagon” makes everything similarly challenging but also says “if you fail a run, your save file will be wiped.”
There's also the “Mechanic's Road Trip” option, which states, “Terrain and vehicle condition affect driving more. Items needed to repair the vehicle are more costly to craft and cannot be crafted while running.” This means someone has removed an important-looking cylinder from the roguelike's hood and mounted My Summer Car directly onto the engine block.
The developers say you can go wild with a bunch of difficulty sliders and create your own special mode. For example, your flat tires can now be flatter and the radiation can be more radioactive. You can turn off the “imbalance storms” that threaten you during a run. Or you can make your engine make a more vroom-vroom noise. There's also the deadly tailgate I mentioned at the beginning of the article – an option called “Tailgate Impact Kills”. Don't laugh! Tailgates are dangerous. My friend gave a concussion when he absentmindedly slammed the tailgate on a date with a girl while she was still looking for something. They got married and had kids. It's possible the concussion was to blame.
There are other changes in the update. You can now play your own music through your car radio and garage jukebox by uploading it directly to a local folder in the game directory. This is great. One of the under-sung strengths of the Road Trip roguelike is its soundtrack, which has some pretty good tunes (my personal favorite is Bloodoath by Exes & Petey).
I quite liked the speed of crafting when I played Pacific Drive, but it did slow me down enough that I lost momentum and couldn't finish the game. Difficulty is hard to gauge, and often one of the best things you can do is leave the finer points of that decision up to the players. So fair play.
Disclosure: Paul Dean, a former RPS contributor and old board game friend of mine, wrote some articles for Pacific Drive, which explains why it's so weird.