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May 18, 2021 · Days Gone is a fun post-apocalyptic road trip simulator, but the things it does well are ultimately overwhelmed by the dreary story, repetitive missions, sluggish controls, and lifeless world.
- pcgamer@futurenet.com
Apr 25, 2019 · Days Gone is a keen and engaging open world zombie adventure despite some issues.
- Senior Guides Co-Ordinator
- leon.hurley@futurenet.com
- Frantic hordes of zombies are exciting, but the world and repetition aren't
- Zom-bye
- On The Road Again
- Life is a Highway
- Verdict
By Lucy O'Brien
Updated: Apr 28, 2020 10:05 pm
Posted: Apr 25, 2019 12:01 pm
Days Gone kicks off relatively simply: you play as a biker riding through an open-world zombie post-apocalypse, seeking answers around his dead wife and smashing enemy faces in with crunchy, weighty melee weapons. Sometimes, there are spectacular hordes of them. So far, so straightforward. Yet through its 60-odd-hour ride, Days Gone loses its focus with repetitive missions, a meandering and thematically unsatisfying storyline, and an excess of bugs and busywork. When you slow down for a minute or two, these issues combine with a dreary, uninteresting open world and add up to an uneven and mostly toothless zombie experience.
For a gruff biker dude traveling through a zombie-infested (okay, they’re technically virus-infected humans called Freakers, but functionally the same thing) Oregon, Deacon St. John is an endearingly gentle and sweet-natured protagonist. His gruff charm and unassuming ‘I ain’t no leader’ demeanor is mostly well voiced by Sam Witwer (AKA Darth Maul on Star Wars: The Clone Wars), aside from moments where he inexplicably yells during stealth missions and an occasional tendency to over-act in more frantic sequences.
His bike is your constant companion, and it handles well and feels great to ride – especially after several damage-absorbing upgrades and the addition of power-boosting nitrous. Drifting around a tight corner is a lot of fun, as is sailing over a break in the road. For a PS4 game that’s so centered on riding, I’m glad that developer Sony Bend nailed that fundamental mechanic.
Still, human marauders and feral Freaker-wannabees, called Rippers, who occupy camps (aka outposts), are fun to rumble with, even if they present a somewhat easy challenge because of a very forgiving style of stealth gameplay. While long grass and plenty of cover help, run-ins with human enemies are made easier by the fact that enemy AI is rarely clustered together. Though you can’t hide bodies in Days Gone, enemies are spread out enough that you can stealth kill one and often leave a body in broad daylight without it being noticed. As long as they’re not facing you, they’ll rarely become aware of your presence.
Even so, I found compulsory stealth-only story missions the least welcome variety in Days Gone. To unlock much of its central mystery, Deacon must snoop on the comings and goings of the National Emergency Response Organization, aka NERO, as they research the freaker outbreak. This involves a several-mission-thread of sneaking into NERO-occupied areas and eavesdropping on them from behind obstacles or within long grass as they explain world lore, which is not particularly interesting and annoyingly repetitive if you fail (and I did, by rushing through in sheer exasperation at having to do the same mission-type over and over.)
If it does end up in an all-out gunfight, there’s more fun to be had. Guns and crossbows in Days Gone feel mostly good to use, and there’s a lot of satisfaction to be gained by clearing out clusters of enemies - zombies and humans alike - with giant napalm molotovs. Deacon can also unlock a focused shot ability from his skill tree early on in the game, which allows him to slow down time in battle. It’s a somewhat inexplicable skill for a regular guy (that he served in the military is the somewhat shaky rationale), but it’s nice to have a way to relieve the pressure for a moment if you get overwhelmed.
Melee, in particular, is a weighty and bloody blast. The crafting system in Days Gone is based on found objects being combined with other found objects, and there’s crunchy satisfaction to be found with combining together a baseball bat with a saw blade and killing an enemy in a single hit. I found myself more invested in crafting the right weapon to swing over finding one to shoot.
Melee, in particular, is a weighty and bloody blast.
“
Even with strong combat, things get boring after a while because Days Gone’s missions suffer from repetition across the board. As Deacon explores Oregon he stumbles across a number of survivor camps, each which has a leader with their own to-do list of various jobs you have to do in order to build enough trust and credits to unlock new weapons and bike upgrades. These jobs tend to be variations on tracking down a traitor or rescuing a hostage or clearing out a camp, and all tend to play out in a similar fashion. A few dozen of hours of this same mission structure took its toll on me.
Ezy RiderLike any good biker, Deacon is constantly tinkering with his motorcycle to upgrade things like speed, durability, fuel capacity, ammo storage, and more. These are all optional, but Days Gone doesn’t really give you an indication of just how crucial it is to focus on speed and fuel upgrades to make getting around less of a chore. I’d neglected to upgrade for Days Gone's first quarter and really paid for it with the amount of time I spent hunting for fuel tanks on foot, and couldn’t easily complete bounty chase missions. Upgrading these early is vital. Unfortunately, I never discovered a rare or cool upgrade in the field, which would definitely have given me more of an incentive to explore.
This extends to the plentiful missions found in the world, as well. Tracking down NERO checkpoints in order to earn vital upgrades to your various stats - health, stamina, and focus - is laborious, as they always required power to properly infiltrate. That means scouring the area to find a gas tank to fill a generator, occasionally replace a busted fuse, then rinse and repeat. It’s never a good sign when you hear your character remark on the repetition of a game mechanic – it suggests the designers are well aware that they’ve played a card too many times – and at several points, Deacon is heard to remark: “Okay lemme guess: outta fuel, of course.” “Hilarious!” I thought, as I went through the same routine for the eighth time.
Elsewhere, dozens of Freaker nests scattered throughout Oregon, which Days Gone urges you to attack by blocking off fast travel access on certain infested routes until they’re cleared. These are satisfying at first - it’s a relief to drive down a Freaker-less highway - but eventually the sheer number of them without any real sense of variety from nest to nest made me lose interest. At a certain point it’s faster to just ride past the nests than to fight through them and then warp.
Its repetition and excess are exacerbated by Days Gone’s fragile bike, which suffers severe damage from contact with just about any object, including, sadly, Freakers themselves. While I don’t mind the sense of vulnerability and urgency this mechanic brought to the table, especially during moments of frantic escape when my bike was on low fuel or ‘health’ and I needed to find parts to repair it, it becomes more of a drag when you simply want to get from A to B to complete a task without the fuss of uncompromising physics. There’s a reason cars in GTA V, for example, can take unrealistic amounts of damage before they catch fire and explode; now imagine the drudgery of not being able to simply grab another one when yours breaks down and you have someplace to be. There’s something ill-fitting about requiring a badass biker with a sweet bike to ride slowly and carefully to avoid scratching the paint.
There are also notable framerate dips while playing on a PS4 Pro at 1080p, and constant instances of objects (or whole areas) popping in and out. The former issue is most troubling when you’re riding at speed on your motorcycle and Days Gone momentarily freezes as if struggling to keep up. It’s nothing game-breaking, but it was a constant reminder that things aren’t as smooth as they should be.
Days Gone’s world certainly needs all the character it can get. While it’s pretty enough and full of dense forest, winding roads, and snow-capped mountains, if you look closer it’s also relatively sparse, with little world-building to differentiate one area from another and not a lot of surprises to be found in its sprawling land mass. Its gutted buildings are particularly dull, shells to house resources without much sense of history. Who lived here, and what happened to them? They left no trace, save the rare collectible note here or there.
It is, in a word, dreary. A series of abandoned cars, tunnels, empty houses against a dull, slate-gray sky. I understand this is a post-apocalyptic setting and don’t expect cheeriness and rainbows, but a general lack of environmental storytelling left me wanting more out of it. This was a world that was once lived in, we’re told, but its uninspired interiors and barren exteriors certainly don’t feel like it.
Even areas populated by humans, like camps, feel curiously characterless. When an NPC in a camp does utter an incidental line, it’s likely one that you’ve heard multiple times before, and though there are optional conversations to be had with a camp’s various mechanics/cooks/bounty collectors, I found very few compelling enough to stick around and listen to. Again, part of the problem here is a self-seriousness - a little humor or sense of weirdness (this is the zombie apocalypse, after all) could have gone a long way.
Its world is also inconsistent. During missions, your bike’s fuel and damage gauges - normally vital things to keep an eye on - will often disappear as if suddenly unimportant, as will NERO-soldiers in a research area you’ve just finished scouting. These are small complaints, but they break the rules of survival that Days Gone otherwise doggedly lives by, and with them the spell of a cohesive, lived-in world.
Days Gone feels bloated, like a movie that goes on for an hour longer than it needs to or should’ve. It’s messy and confused, but peppered with genuinely thrilling encounters with rampaging hordes of zombies and occasionally breathless firefights. There’s a good game in here somewhere, but it’s buried in a meandering storyline, repetitive missions,...
Apr 25, 2019 · Rescuing survivors, hunting, and collecting random plants suggests an open-world structure ripe with possibilities, but Days Gone’s landscape is more dull than it appears. The map has a lot of land on it, but it’s not filled with intriguing side stories, characters, and situations.
- Matthew Kato
In Days Gone, you play as a biker named Deacon St. John and you go from camp to camp trying to keep your biker friend nicknamed ‘Boozer’ alive, and eventually something else (no spoilers). We’ll start the review off by talking about the open world.
Apr 26, 2019 · Improved by many updates, "Days Gone" is a fun open-world zombie game from the makers of "Syphon Filter". A 40-hour adventure, it'll appeal to fans of "The Last of Us" and "Red Dead Redemption". The gameplay is more challenging than you'd expect.
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Apr 25, 2019 · Days Gone is an open-world action-adventure game set two years after a devastating global pandemic. Play as Deacon St. John, a bounty hunter facing a brutal struggle for survival, searching for...
