The Queue: My Summer Car?

I love a bumper sticker that says everything I was thinking so I don’t have to communicate it in my own words.

This is The Queue, our daily column where you ask us questions, and we’ll brake for eldritch anomalies.

As a survival game with driving elements and a vibe which is simultaneously retro and mysterious, the only way this game could be more tailored to my interests is if I had a puppy as a copilot, and if the ingame radio had classic literature audiobooks and karaoke. But then, of course, I’d be very concerned about the welfare of my puppy, which would be quite distressing, so maybe not.

The one thing I’m simultaneously frustrated and charmed by is the fact that not a ton of stuff is thoroughly explained — but this ties back into the vibes, because there’s so much about this game, including the frustration, that truly feels like it’s me taking care of a classic car. The manuals even contain ASCII art! And the best part is how each individual car has its own weird little personality, in part due to how I’m allowed to decorate my car, but also there’s a whole system of “quirks,” where you have to puzzle out the odd little things that happen with your own car, and they vary from player to player. I had a quirk where, when I turned on my wipers, the fuel gauge would malfunction and swipe back and forth in time with the wipers. It makes the car feel so much like mine, even moreso than being able to decorate it and paint it and slap a fun bumper sticker on it.

I guess in some ways, the car is the puppy.

In general, I’m having a lot of the same vibes as I do with The Long Dark. I love it so much I want to live there forever, and yet part of the reasons I love it are directly tied to the reasons I’d hesitate to full-throttle recommend it to anyone unless I am completely assured they have the same sensibilities, because it definitely isn’t for everyone. I’d recommend a game like Vampire Survivors to anyone because the gameplay is straightforward, learnable, and repeatable, and the game itself is inexpensive enough for an “eh, just try it.” Pacific Drive is quirky and thoughtful and weird, simultaneously slow and breakneck. If you get it, you get it.

In short, no.

I’m very sympathetic to the need to afk quickly and immediately. After all, I have children. But Pacific Drive does have a quick pause function, which allows me to quick AFK for a few minutes — which is, honestly, a big reason I’ve grown relatively cold on Overwatch 2. The instant I queue into even Quick Play or even a breezy Arcade match, somebody inevitably upends a gallon of maple syrup on the carpet or something. They have a sixth sense.

Anyway, the issue lies at the intersection of gameplay and general player behavior, namely how Pacific Drive wants to make your car rather destructible based on your decisions, driving habits, etc, but they know with a quicksave feature, gamers are gonna savescum. By not allowing you to quick f5 before taking the risk of sliding your car down a hill, and instead only allowing you to savescum back at the beginning of the individual map (many journeys traverse several maps with very different conditions), it means that yes, you can savescum if you lose or break something, but it’s a much weightier, more important decision. Otherwise, people are going to say “oh oops, there was an anomaly there and I punctured a tire, let’s reset that 5 seconds back.”

I personally have only savescummed once. In a light spoiler, I didn’t realize that the various addons you can strap to the outside of the car were also destructible (even though they also have damage indicators on the dash, so I really should have), so when I lost my huge roof rack storage on the final map of a four-leg journey, I restarted that final map, despite the fact that I’d be losing around 15 minutes worth of progress on that map. It was a weighty, consequential decision to make. I’d found a whole huge cache of a few materials and other things I desperately needed on maps 2 and 3, so though it sucked to make that choice, it was one worth making. And that’s why they made the decision to not allow it — it’s a part of the overall game design and feel. They want it to suck if you have to restart a map. It’s a feature, not something they overlooked.

Though I’d make a case that maybe they should consider a mode where quicksave is allowed, but achievements are turned off or something.

I’ve seen a ton of people discussing Helldivers 2 in general — it’s been #1 on the Steam bestseller chart for a few weeks, so of course it’s being discussed in some ways — but part of the reason I haven’t seen a ton of weighty discourse is because, I think, they did already do it with Starship Troopers. It seems a pastiche of that movie every time a piece of media celebrates military action in a weirdly gleeful, over the top way we don’t see in, say, Call of Duty.

A lot of the people I’ve seen praising Helldivers 2 are basically saying that it’s Overwatch 2 if OW2 was PVE, which we all know is something people have wanted since Overwatch 2 was announced as being worthy of sequel status specifically because of its PVE gameplay.

Ahem. Anyway. It also has some shades of Deep Rock Galactic, which was another relatively recent indie hotness, specifically because of its PVE co-op gameplay.

I haven’t had much experience with it myself since I’m currently obsessed with fixing my idiot baby car, but it looks like a fun experience if you like those other titles. It seems like one of those pressure release festival-of-violence sort of games that are phenomenal for relieving stress for some people, though I’ve heard horror stories about people in pugs being kinda jerks if you aren’t running an absolutely optimal build (but that seems pretty consistent with like, all PVE co-op gameplay, including WoW pugs).

Same. Paladins.

Melee classes in general are at the bottom of the barrel for me. I keep coming back to Rogues because stealth tends to be my jam in games where that’s a feature, and I’ll always be trying to recapture that reflexive healing Monk dream from back in the day. But Warriors and Paladins? Meh. Warrior I picked up a bit because they were so OP for lowbie play, and they were kinda fun in level 19 locked PVP, but I never went much beyond that. Paladins just left me cold.