Pacific Drive review

What is it? A singleplayer first-person driving survival game with maybe the best car ever
Expect to pay: $30/£25
Developer: Ironwood Studios
Reviewed on: Intel i7-9700K, RTX 4070 Ti, 16GB RAM
Multiplayer? Nope.
Link: Official site

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 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 those 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 where 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 wagon in Pacific Drive 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, Pacific Drive puts an exciting and fresh new spin (ha ha, because tires) on the survival genre.

After mysterious science experiments in Washington state's heavily forested Olympic Peninsula went horribly awry, the government built a towering concrete wall around it and called it quits. Trapped inside the barricades of what's now called the Olympic Exclusion Zone, you've got nothing but your clunker, a workbench in a dimly lit garage, and the guidance of a few oddball scientists who chat to you (and each