Recent reviews by Sondy

I'm writing this at over 50 hours into my save (I played a lot of time offline on steam)

Where do I start... The game is a fantastic combination of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. style anomalies and post-apocalypse aesthetic, a Jalopy-like car maintenance game, and a looter-crafter the likes of 7-Days to Die. You won't be running around shooting any enemies or anything crazy like that.

The world is an staged-open one, where you travel between zones (with loading screens that show a road map and allow you to pick the next one, ala FTL, Slay the Spire, Peglin, and others, but with a thematic flair) and then have free roam around that map as if you were in any other open world game. The zones are big, and can take upwards of an hour to explore if you make it your goal to visit every single point of interest and loot until you have no more space. The anomalies range from completely tacit to incredibly dangerous and gunning to ruin your day, so it's a tossup of how exciting your drive will be at any given time. The loot is all over the place, and you'll have a boot bursting at the seams by the time you finish any given run. There are tons of tools and upgrades to unlock that augment your play experience.

I've seen a lot of people refer to this and I'll start by pointing at it too, but with some counter arguments for why it's not as big a deal as it seems to be: There is no saving while currently exploring a zone and no quicksave function. This is partially to facilitate a sense of finality with visiting any zone on your drive, but also partially a failure on the developers' part to implement such a feature, either because of an oversight or because of their own inclinations. Either way, it can be frustrating for those who have hectic lives or run into problems with outside-game issues or crashing. That being said, there is a togglable option to make it so that failed runs have no penalty (under Gameplay in the settings), and the ability to abandon a run at any given time, and this at least alleviates a small amount of the issue by giving players partial control over when their run ends. It's also possible to exit a run early successfully by opening a gateway (if you're in a map that has any available) and entering it as per normal. These don't solve all of the issues, but they're available options and shouldn't be overlooked. There are also many other accessibility and Difficulty options, like being able to disable Instability and Gateway Storms (time limits).

Now, on the more positive side;

The audio and visual design of this game are fantastic. It really captures the feeling of driving through a post-apocalyptic pacific northwest, with the environments ranging from rainy pine forests to murky mires to desolate burned out hills. The sounds of nearby anomalies tearing through the landscape carry on the wind and give you a sense of unease as you hurriedly loot a hastily abandoned lab trailer and the croon of a forlorn singer blares loudly through the open door of your station wagon to calm you down. The wail of a far off siren warns you that the Instability is coming soon, the worrisome buzzer of your car console simultaneously urging you to DRIVE before you find you find your trip abruptly cut short. The wooshing of wind and crackling of energy the likes of which you've never experienced herald your success as you crash through the Gate and back to the safety of your garage. As you pull into the greasy but cozy workshop you temporarily call home, the clinks and rattles of your station wagon's engine as it whines about the stressful outing remind you that you made it this time, but there are always new dangers to prepare for.
Unfortunately, both of these fantastic points are lightly marred.
While visually the game is beautiful, it suffers from a lack of optimization, with shadows being the biggest offender for newer cards (I found that setting them to medium or lower maintains a stable framerate at a minimal impact to fidelity), and the amount of time you spend in each zone type makes the environments begin to slowly feel less and less interesting. This combined with the frequent washout effects of radiation anomalies, fog, abnormally impenetrable darkness, and regular rain storms makes it so that I often spend less time appreciating the high quality environment and instead just focus on rushing through as quickly as possible.

The audio design is fantastic, and the environmental sounds really drive (haha, drive) the game, the soundtrack is filled with incredible bangers that suit the mood of an early to mid-90s road trip through the backroads of the PNW, and the intermittent interruptions of pirate radio give the world a surprisingly lived-in feel. Unfortunately, that same soundtrack is incredibly short in run time, and you'll find yourself listening to the same radio tracks multiple times in a run or eventually turning off the radio altogether and putting on your own music externally or driving in silence. As of right now, it's unknown if there are plans to add new music content to the game, and there's no current way to add your own music to the in-game playlist.

The upgrade system is surprisingly deep and it will have you making many, many runs into the Zone to find parts and LIM Energy of different varieties to build new tools, car parts, and accessories that augment future runs. It can take days or even weeks of intermittent playtime to get all of the resources required to support traveling deeper into the zone while also filling out the upgrade menu. Each new category of car upgrade visually modifies your station wagon while granting it a different set of resistances, accessories grant new quality of trip improvements such as better storage or extended battery life, or even the ability to scan for resources while out on the road. Powerful modifications allow you to do everything from turn on an active shield against physical damage, to launch yourself into the air using a powerful spring, to even slow down local time temporarily!
Unfortunately, this same upgrade system can simultaneously be one of Pacific Drive's biggest weaknesses. The procedurally generated nature of the Zone means that you will find yourself often traveling out to an area only to find that virtually none of the resource you needed for an upgrade unlock is available, and what little you do find is used to craft a resource that you couldn't make that same trip without. The POIs are reused everywhere, and there isn't much variety to the building types you'll see (less than 10 variations of enterable buildings in general, with most of them only having a shack-style floorplan), so you'll quickly find yourself bored of looting the same building for the nth time only to find the most common of resources. As you progress into the game, the resources that you'll need most of will also be the most scarce, forcing you to go on increasingly long runs just to gain a fraction of the total that you need, and without careful planning, you can quickly find yourself burning through more resources than you gain while having an overabundance of resources that you don't need, and your storage being a mess of random parts that are simply taking up space while you have them only to become a desperate requirement the moment you rid yourself of them. Pare this with parts regularly breaking and degrading and you have a constant babysitting game of repairing and replacing car parts and tools.

All in all, I love the game, and I think it's a fantastic combination of adventure-roguelike and extraction-looter. I think it has a lot going on for it, and I think that it offers a great gameplay opportunity. That being said, I think there are many areas I would improve on if I were in charge, and those shortfalls hurt it a lot.
Still, I wholly recommend this to anyone looking for a good few hours of fantastically voiced story and an accessible, fun driving-roguelike.

This game is so much fun after you get past the difficulties of learning how to play as sharks. The only people playing in online public lobbies right now, though, are people who have been playing since day one. This game desperately needs community growth, but playing with a party of friends, even against bots, is incredibly satisfying and fun on either team.

Ran a ghost around a table for 30 seconds and got 4 pictures of it
10/10

This game might be for you if you enjoy:
Hectic third-person action
Rogue-like item randomization and enemy gen
Increasing difficulty over time
A slamming soundtrack
Hearing your friends panic

Risk of Rain 2 expands on the original Risk of Rain's fast paced enemy grind by bringing things to the realm of 3D, where you now have 6 axes of movement and many new possibilities for attack and being attacked. The game-play is the same bullet-hell-but-with-melee-mixed-in brawl that we've come to know and love, and it's been executed extremely well here.

Without going into too much detail, the items in the game feel good to get, and most of them have a significant combined effect on your movement, stopping power, or survivability. The characters are all unique and introduce new methods of game-play that are separately loads of fun with each unlock, and unlocking them is its own journey that's worth surviving for. The game is inherently a grind brawler, but the grind continues to feel fun even an hour or more into a session. With friends, the game easily turns into a party of panicked shouts and screams and laughter, and that alone more than pays for it.

The soundtrack is exquisitely well produced and arranged, and the sounds in general give the world a sense of aural depth that makes it feel pleasant to move about in. I'd recommend picking up the soundtrack alone even if you weren't interested in the game. It's that good.

The main downside to this game is that it is a grind game. If you don't enjoy that sort of game-play, it will run out of its welcome with you fairly quickly. However, if you can get past that, the game has infinite pick-up-and-play potential. There's something to be said for that in a gaming landscape where a lot of games are one-and-done experiences.

Game-play: 8/10
Visuals: 7/10
Sound: 10/10
Replayability: 10/10
Difficulty: 5/10 - 9/10
Overall Rating: 8.7/10

3/10 servers are ♥♥♥♥ but I love hitting balls.

Let me start off by saying that I so badly want to love this game. I absolutely love the concept, I love the gameplay, I love the rush of adrenaline that it gives me. This game is wicked fun, and losing or winning, I have a ball every time!

... When I can actually get a match, stay connected without issues, and see the game all the way through to the grisly end without unintended issues like clipping into a rock and getting stuck thanks to interpolation issues.

I've given this game nearly a day of hours in gameplay, and most of that has been spent sitting in a lobby attempting to connect to a match. A lack of a proper queuing system, no matchmaking filters, and flakier than acceptable client code makes this game more of a chore than a game. If you attempt to queue into a match and the game fails to connect you after about 10 seconds, you are forced to manually start searching again. If you leave a lobby, you are forced to wait 10 seconds before you can join another one. If the killer disconnects from the lobby and you are playing as a survivor, the lobby is disbanded and you are forced to start the process of finding a lobby all over again.

Take note, this is describing the process of getting into a pre-game lobby as a single player. If you are trying to play with a group of friends as survivors, good luck getting into a game at all. As of the time of this writing, I have already had more than two occasions in which I had a full group of survivors and was never matched to a killer after more than 30 minutes of attempting to queue.

Once into a match, the game runs fairly smooth, but the host has advantage (the host is always the killer), and if they are on a poor connection, you can expect rubber banding and location resolution issues as the game attempts to compensate your position for your killer's connection. Some of the myriad problems I've run into (only rarely, but often enough to be mentioned) are being relocated into a rock and stuck long after all of the other survivors have exited the match; rocketing forward twice the distance I should have traveled directly into a wall and stuck there as I watched the killer walk up to me and proceed to smash me into it; being suddenly moved two character widths to the right as I attempt to climb through a window, thus rendering the window unusable and me a sitting duck for the wraith who was following me; and many more, all random, but all usually at the worst possible times.

As of this review, I've uninstalled the game entirely, and I refuse to install it again until I see patch notes fixing, at the very least, the matchmaking issues. I wouldn't recommend this game to anybody at its current price in its current state. Buy at your own risk.

Do you like mindless killing, unabated slaughtering of innocent beasts, and big guns? Well, this is the game for you! Run around vast environments, collect literally thousands of weapons, and explode heads everywhere you go! Also, gore! And character customization! And co-op multiplayer! Everything you could possibly want from a video game about making things go KABOOM!

BLOOD AND GUTS, EVERYTHING DIEING, SO MANY ZOMBIES, MY LEG IS, OH MY GOD, OH MY G-- PEELZ EVERYWHAR!!!!

This game is hardcore as far as shooters go. Has a lot of graphics errors in MP, but is well worth the gameplay.