The Long Drive is a very weird game. Meaning that it doesn’t really have a purpose to it, you’re just basically supposed to drive around and see the sights in a post-apocalyptic randomly generated infinite wasteland. This is essentially a road trip game, but you’re on your own on this road trip. It focuses on giving the players much-deserved freedom, with some unique driving and exploration mechanics that will make for a great immersive experience.
How to Download The Long Drive
You can download the game from Steam. To start – click on the Download button at the end of the review.
The Game Review
Story and Setting
There isn’t much to talk about within this category in regards to this game; honestly, there isn’t much to talk about at all with this game. The game world itself is ever-expanding and basically limitless. The map doesn’t have an edge; it is a never-ending deserted post-apocalyptic wasteland with everything being within your reach.
You are a wanderer, just driving around in your car looking for anything and everything that you can find. You’re not going to find much, not another person or a living species; just more rocks and mountains and a stretch of never-ending roads.
Gameplay and Design
This game has a lot of potential, it’s definitely a niche game that isn’t meant for everyone but it does have decent potential. In its current state, however, it is definitely not worth your money or anyone else’s. It compensates for its lack of content or gameplay mechanics by bringing in Postal-like antics, such as being able to take a dump on the floor, which is just a boring take on comedy if I’ve ever seen one.
There is a lot that needs to be done to make this game complete because as it happens it’s not very much a game at all. More like a car visual novel.
The driving mechanics are actually decent until you reach the higher speed limits, in which department it does need a bit of reworking. It gives you the same frequency of turning power despite the speed you’re going in, which leads to a lot of hard rights or hard lefts when you were just trying to straighten your car.
The common industry standard for driving physics is that the turning becomes less precise the higher the car’s speed gets, whereas here it is just as precise as taking a turn right after you start the engine. The car constantly crashed and it takes away from a lot of the fun.
The only appeal to this game is the car. You collect parts and add them to your car to make it look and feel however you want. However, there are literally zero repercussions to crashing in this game. Sure the parts fly off if you hit something, but you just pick them up and attach them easily.
You don’t even get to use the spare tires that you can carry around in your trunk because the tires are literally indestructible. Some changes to this regard should really be made, and a ton of difficulty spikes need to be added honestly.
Now, let’s address the elephant in the room: There is a vast lack of content. There is almost nothing to do but to drive and see the subpar graphics. It needs things to do, it doesn’t have anything. You run into the same 3 buildings every 500 kilometers of empty wasteland. It’s just empty, there is actually nothing here.
Verdict
The Long Drive is a game with a lot of potential that is squandered by subpar mechanics, a not-so-challenging difficulty setting, and an egregiously large lack of content. The game needs to go through some serious overhaul and who knows? It could become something like No Man’s Sky!
