Pacific Drive (Demo) - First Thoughts

Pacific Drive has been front and center in a lot of videos I've seen about Steam's Next Fest event so I naturally had to give it a shot. The idea of an apocalyptic survival setting, blending games like Organ Trail and Snowrunner really sounded appealing! 

Playing on SteamDeck I had to dial back the settings that, for some reason, had all been set to ultra. I get that the devs want the game to look it's best from the start to "wow" the player but some configuration detection routines to set initial video settings would have been useful. 

Right from the off, I found the controls to be difficult. Sadly because it's a demo, and very new, there were no published community control schemes available. I pushed on with the defaults....

I struggled with picking up the wheel to fix the car, as it wasn't obvious I had to hold the RB button down instead of tapping it to pick up the wheel. Eventually I realised this and some other controls started making sense. 

Getting into the car was really difficult for some reason. No matter where I aimed and what buttons I tapped I would I just couldn't get in the car. Eventually I did it by accident. When I ran out of gas and had to syphon some from a nearby wreck, getting back into the car before the anomaly reached me nigh on impossible and ruined the immersion of the game for me. After much furious stabbing at buttons I, largely by accident again, managed to get back into the car and continue on. It was only after I got the car into Oppy's Garage that the car door mechanic started making more sense. I guess this could be a SteamDeck issue more than anything potentially.

Driving in general was okay, not great. I kinda liked the internal car controls despite playing on the SteamDeck touchpad. Being a fan of games like SpinTires, this wasn't entirely alien. The steering whilst driving was atrocious though, with very little granularity. It felt like I was constantly correcting the direction more than anything.

When it came to scavenging parts to repair the car I again found it tricky to understand what controls I had to use to do things. I somehow managed to get the flares out of the trunk of the wreck there because realising I had to use the prybar to open it, but then I couldn't work out how to take parts from that wreck to fit to my car. No button combinations worked.

The UI for collecting and arranging items, equipping them, etc I found rather busy and overly complex to the eye. It took me a couple of attempts of accidentally dropping the tool kit to realise how to move things around in the backpack.

When I was directed to a dumpster it popped open but nothing else happened. I got the impression it was meant to be alive, like a mimic or something, but that didn't come across too clearly. Then I broke the prybar somehow.

Confused and frustrated I decided to call it quits for that play session. I may well fire it up for a second attempt by my first impressions left me a little let down. Maybe my downfall was playing it in handheld mode on SteamDeck and not having it connected to a monitor with keyboard and mouse.