Long Drive North: Co-Op RV Simulator is an upcoming survival simulation game where you do whatever it takes to escape a deadly storm. Read on to learn everything we know, our review of the demo, and more.
Everything We Know About Long Drive North: Co-Op RV Simulator
Long Drive North: Co-Op RV Simulator Plot
You’re a long way from home with nothing but your trusty RV. Face the unforgiving post-disaster American wilderness as you look to escape a deadly, incoming storm.
Long Drive North: Co-Op RV Simulator Gameplay
Inspired by games like The Long Dark, The Long Drive, and My Summer Car, Long Drive North: Co-op RV Simulator is a survival simulation game where you explore an open-world, sandbox wilderness for anything you can find to survive through the deadly elements. Play alone or with up to 4 different players in separate RVs.
Drive your trusty RV while maintaining it by using the different parts you find from abandoned vehicles to refuel and repair your own. Survive by managing your sleep, hunger, and thirst by foraging, hunting, and scavenging.
Long Drive North: Co-Op RV Simulator Release Date
As of writing, Long Drive North: Co-Op RV Simulator is available in Early Access for PC (Steam). The developers have stated that they will stay in Early Access for 18-24 months, depending on the community’s feedback.
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| Price | $24.99 | ||||
Long Drive North: Co-Op RV Simulator Review (Early Access)
Survival sandbox games tend to put you in situations where you have to make do with whatever you’re given and wherever you’re put. While the setting and setup differ from game to game, that’s normally how it goes. Games like Pacific Drive, Green Hell, Subnautica, and even No Man’s Sky—the core foundation of these games is to be able to adapt to the harsh conditions and work around the environment you’re in.
Enter Long Drive North: Co-Op RV Simulator, a survival simulation game where you’re forced to endure the bitter cold and be on the run from an incoming storm of an unprecedented scale. Aboard your rundown but reliable RV, you enter the unknown with nothing but a few tools in hand. But is it worth your time and money? Well, read on and find out.
Go North, No Questions Asked
As explained earlier, the premise of Long Drive North has you running from a storm that’s on the way to destroy everything in its wake. The only things you have are an RV and your trusty dog by your side. Everything else you’ll need to find and scavenge from the abandoned cars and buildings.
And that’s it. There’s literally nothing else.
In terms of a narrative, the game doesn’t have one yet. Aside from the knowledge of a storm coming, there’s nothing else that propels the game forward. And there are a ton of questions to ask about the setting. What’s up north? Where in America are we? Why did my character get left behind? And most importantly, where IS everyone?
As of now, the game is too open-ended and lacks a direction besides ironically telling you to go north to run away from impending doom. There’s a ton of potential with setting up how the game will be structured and how the plot progresses from here on out. The developers have already stated that a story and more lore implementation are in the works, but that’s still a long way off based on their roadmap.
Barebones Survival Maintenance
So if the narrative is lacking, what about the gameplay?
Well, it’s familiar, at least. It’s basically a barebones version of popular survival games. In comparison, it’s quite literally the barebones version of the games it's inspired by, specifically The Long Dark, The Long Drive, and My Summer Car.
You have your basic needs management system: hunger, hydration, and rest are the three primary needs you have to meet as you progress. In addition to these three, you also have your health and your dog’s health to maintain, since you can be harmed by falling, staying out in freezing temperatures, and opening doors with your bare hands.
To meet these needs, it’s about as obvious as you think it is: you’ll need to find the necessary items to keep their levels stable so that you don’t keel over from the cold. As for health, you’ll need to either rest, sleep, or bandage your wounds to heal. Your dog’s health is a bit easier since you’ll just need to feed it food to stay alive.
Aside from the basic needs, you also have to maintain the only reason why you’re alive in the first place: the RV. The RV has parts that you’ll need to monitor as you journey north, essentially the same parts that you would need to check if you ever owned a car. For those who don’t, however, it’s basically the engine, oil and coolant levels, battery, fuel, and the tires.
There’s also a crafting system to help you survive the harsh cold. The resources are also quite basic, specifically wood, rocks, cloth, rubber, and scrap metal. These items, along with standard crafting recipes, make up the bulk of the crafting and repair system that you’ll be using throughout.
Additionally, there’s a simple inventory system to hold all the items you’ll need for survival. But here lies one of the game’s problems, which we’ll get into later. So if you’ve been reading so far, you’ll notice that the game does have a sense of survival with the needs you have to manage. The problem is that its simplicity reflects the world you’re exploring.
As Barren As It Is Simple
The foundation of its survival hinges on managing the needs that you have at the moment. And as it stands, the world you’re exploring is barren and empty. For context, my playthrough was almost a lost cause because I wasn’t finding any point of interest to loot from. I pushed on through; my character was both starved and tired since looting outside only quickened the inevitable.
Luckily, I found an abandoned ranger station that contained useful items like bottled water, canned meat, a rifle, a crowbar, a wrench, and more. So that got me thinking: if I had never found this station, I would’ve been dead in just 10 minutes since I started the playthrough.
Which brings us back to the game’s emptiness, since your survival hinges on how lucky you are in finding points of interest. The game doesn’t have a map, so you’re driving blind with only the thought of going north as your only objective. It also doesn’t take long for anyone to realize that areas tend to repeat themselves, but we’ll get to that later.
To add further context, most of the points of interest that I found while on the road were mostly cars until I got to that specific ranger station. The cars did not have any food, which meant the choice was either to forage for wild plants to eat or keep driving.
I chose the latter because not only did I not have enough food to satiate my hunger, but I also didn’t have enough resources, like wood and rock, to craft a campfire. Essentially, the choice boiled down to exploration not being worth it due to the scarcity of the most basic resources. To make things worse, the foraged plants only provided so little to the hunger meter without cooking them that it felt useless to forage instead of finding actual food.
So while my luck did pull me through, the playthrough started doomed from the get-go. After finding that one ranger station and getting the essentials, I found the experience to be smooth sailing from here on out. There was nothing else to challenge me since I was already equipped with enough things to help me survive from point to point.
Which then brings us to the next problem: the inventory system.
A Hoarder’s Paradise
One of the main things that you’ll need to juggle in any survival game is inventory management. In Long Drive North, it’s a very barebones system that only holds a set number of unique items. However, certain items don’t have a limit on how many of these unique items can be carried.
After that initial trip of luckily finding supplies, I found myself with an overabundance of water, which meant that I would never go thirsty unless I purposefully threw away every bottle of water that I had. At one point, I had more than 40 of them in my inventory, which meant I really had to try to get myself thirsty.
Wood and rock are the same, as I used the one crowbar I found to search barrels for supplies and was immensely rewarded for looting every one I came across. In contrast, usable items like crowbars, knives, wrenches, and rifles are items that you’ll want to find and store in your RV for backup.
Speaking of storing things in your RV, that’s also an issue. To be able to craft an actual storage cabinet, you’ll need to upgrade your crafting level to level 3. They don’t even teach you how to upgrade your crafting level, and it was something that I just came across as I was looking for things to craft.
However, it doesn’t seem necessary to craft a storage cabinet, since you can simply keep things in the RV by dropping them inside it. The only reason I crafted one was for cleanliness's sake and so that the RV doesn’t look like a mobile garage sale.
And it doesn’t stop there. There are many of these seemingly unintended things that made the game a lot worse than it already is. After all, hoarding only works when you’re solo and highlights the next problem of the game: the balancing of solo versus co-op.
Solo and Co-Op Experiences Are Night and Day
As I explained earlier, I found myself with an overabundance of resources early on in my solo playthrough. In contrast, the co-op playthrough I played with colleagues was vastly different, as I now had to share items with additional people, and items don’t scale based on the number of players.
Sure, I get that playing the game cooperatively is the intended way to play the game, but if you’re offering a single-player mode, it might be best if you’re able to balance the game towards that as well.
Bugs and More "Features"
In The Long Dark, the main inspiration for the game’s winter survival aspect, creating a campfire is an absolute necessity for food, hydration (water needs to be sterilized before it’s drinkable), and keeping yourself warm. So imagine my reaction when I discovered that you could literally just eat everything raw, obtain clean bottled water anywhere, and skip the problem of freezing temperatures by moving your bedroll in your RV.
I get that you could do this, but with the lack of a penalty, it trivializes the supposed challenge of having a campfire at the ready when you need cooked food, clean water, or a fire to keep yourself toasty. If anything, I felt that campfires weren’t as needed after finding enough resources to just keep chugging on through.
In addition to these "features," several bugs made it more frustrating. One of which was a bug with one of the flashlights being stuck to my character. It looked awkward and off-putting, especially since it’s floating on my character without using it.
Another bug was losing certain items due to how the controls and inventory system work. It’s very easy to make the mistake of dropping the wrong item from your inventory due to how the game highlights the current item you’re equipped with and the item you’re hovering over in the inventory. I would even go so far as to say that this was probably one of the things that almost killed my playthrough.
Lastly, the biggest issue is the procedurally generated and looping segments of the map. After some time, I wondered why I was seeing the same area despite going north the whole time. I then discovered that I actually wasn’t crazy and that areas were actually looping as you go along.
It came to a point where I would find similarly placed objects with varying item placements, where some of them would be floating. I can only assume that these were the result of having procedurally generated shelters with varying item placements that result in these visual bugs.
A Trip to Skip On
I understand that it’s supposed to be Early Access, but with how the game looks and functions, it’s looking pretty grim. Don’t get me wrong, I did say that the game has actual potential with the possibilities that the developers could muster and its open-ended nature.
However, pricing the game at $25 while offering a repetitive and barebones experience is actually criminal. In no way is this game ready for Early Access, and there’s an argument that it’s not even prepared as a beta.
The way the systems are flawed to the point where they trivialize each other is a big part of why the game needs a massive overhaul to really get itself going. Exploration is pointless since having a crowbar gives you access to opening barrels that reward better loot, campfires are unneeded unless you want to cook food, and looping areas turn it into a repetitive survival experience quickly.
As you can see, there are way too many problems with Long Drive North, and I would honestly recommend skipping it until the developers pull off a comeback similar to the level of how Hello Games did for No Man’s Sky. They can still turn things around, but so far, the storm is catching up and will inevitably swallow this game whole if they don’t act fast.
Game8 Reviews
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Long Drive North: Co-Op RV Simulator Product Information
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| Title | LONG DRIVE NORTH: CO-OP RV SIMULATOR |
|---|---|
| Release Date | November 18, 2025 |
| Developer | Mindflair Games LTD |
| Publisher | Excalibur Games |
| Supported Platforms | PC (Steam) |
| Genre | Survival, Simulation |
| Number of Players | 1-4 (Online Co-op) |
| ESRB Rating | RP |
| Official Website | Long Drive North: Co-Op RV Simulator Official Website |
