If (like me) you found developer Ironwood Studios' wonderfully strange four-wheeled survival game Pacific Drive a little gruelling when it launched earlier this year, now might be the time to turn it back around: its new Drive Your Way update features a bunch of custom difficulty settings and presets to make things easier – or masochistically harder, if you prefer.
With the new Pacific Drive update installed, players can immediately choose from seven presets that allow them to fine-tune the difficulty of their adventures in the Olympic Exclusion Zone. These range from the standard Pacific Drive experience to Joyride, which retains the same fundamental core but reduces gathering, crafting, and research requirements, to presets that lean heavily in the opposite direction. Nuclear Journey, for example, covers everything in lethal radiation, while Iron Wagon not only makes things harder, it wipes your save if you fail.
It doesn't end there, though; the Drive Your Way update also lets players create their own presets, with over 50 considerably more granular settings available, complete with adjustable value sliders for each, as detailed in the video below.
And given that Eurogamer's Chris Tapsell called Pacific Drive a “series of cruel brutalisations” and “horrible pain” in his four-star review, that extra help might be appreciated.
Elsewhere in the update, custom music can now be played from local storage on the PC, bumpers and wheels can now be painted, and there are two new collectible cosmetics (an antenna ornament and a mirror hanger) in the Exclusion Zone. Additionally, Ironwood has released the paid Anomalous Cosmetic Pack DLC, which contains the Mailbox Bunny bobblehead, Sawblade hood ornament, Tourist shifter, Anchor steering wheel, Vacation decal pack, and Anomaly decal kit.
Previously, Ironwood revealed that this latest release would be the second of three updates planned for 2024. Summer brought with it a photo mode, new car and garage content, plus free (and paid) cosmetics, and following on from the new Pacific Drive fall update, another is expected this “winter.” As for what it might contain, that’s unclear at the moment, with its content only listed as “censored.”