A LOVE/HATE RELATIONSHIP WITH THE APOCALYPSE.
When Days Gone was announced I feel as if the response was either disdain for a game that looked like but wasn’t The Last of Us or excitement. I have to say that I fell into the latter. The idea of a large, open world game populated with zombie swarms was neat. Most post apocalyptic zombie stories are generally linear games, so the idea that I would get to explore the world seemed interesting to me.
Be careful what you wish for.
Plain and simple, Days Gone is an open world stealth game. While later parts of the game can be faced more head on, early portions demand stealth for survival. Speaking of survival, this game has crafting, repairing equipment, and the rarely found mechanic of vehicles (specifically motorcycles in Days Gone) needing fuel. This is all great. The shooting feels good, the crafting feels necessary, and oddly enough the necessity on finding gas for Deacon’s bike isn’t as intrusive as it could have been.
PLATFORMS: PS4
MSRP: $59.99
PRICE I’D PAY: $49.99
The story of Days Gone starts with Deacon St. John, our gruff biker hero, putting his wife Sarah on what appears to be a military chopper as all hell breaks loose. Deacon doesn’t leave with her because his friend and fellow biker Boozer is injured and won’t make it without his help, and the helicopter can only hold two people. Two years later is where the game portion starts. Deacon thinks his wife is dead but has hope she might have survived. Civilization is gone and only small camps of survivors exist amongst a virus outbreak causing people to turn into “Freakers”.
The plot and acting are very well done (don’t believe the choice snippets snarky folks on Twitter post). What really gets me is that even though I would expect things to happen and then they would, there was always a surprise twist to it. I hate being able to see the twist coming because it means one of two things: the writers have either foreshadowed an event and made it way too obvious or the writers stuck too close to overused tropes. While I will say that the most obvious plot element in this game has one of the most obvious conclusions, the delivery of it and the way they subverted the expectations was genius.
What I think impresses me the most is that for a post apocalyptic game the game isn’t always doom and gloom. In fact, the game’s variety of characters each have a different way of coping with the terrible world they live in, and it is nice to see that over the usual gruff marauders that a lot of post apocalyptic stories feature. The most interesting choice character wise is that Deacon talks to himself like a person trying to work out his problems.
Problems. This game has them. There are a lot of small performance issues. Character models not fully loading in, side missions loading the civilian on top of the car so I can’t finish it and send him to a camp, and a stutter that happens after I’ve played the game for a while (a possible memory leak issue). None of these are game breaking, but after playing this game through multiple patches, those issues do still remain. I think the bigger problem is that this game desperately needed to be edited down. The open world is a lot of nothing of interest. Realizing that filling the world with interesting things to do would be overkill, when the majority of terrain looks the same, with no landmarks. I didn’t learn to move through the world organically and am stuck using the minimap GPS, which is fine, but trees are boring to look at.
I think the biggest and most egregious example of this open world bloat is that every side mission is going to a place and killing a dude. Sometimes it is a place you’ve already been. Those missions can’t be activated until a character calls Deacon to see them at the camp they are located in, and they will only call Deacon when he is not at a camp. That means I would complete a side mission, turn it in, have to leave the camp to get a call, and return to the same person I was just talking to to get a new mission. The story in this game is prolonged through tedium. It’s not the worst bloat I’ve seen in a game, but this game needed a large portion of it just cut off. There’s multiple false endings which makes the tedium more annoying. I would think I’d hit the end but no; there’s probably an hour more of plot and eight hours more of just driving around and shooting guys that I’ve been doing for the last twenty or more hours.
I like Days Gone. I really like Deacon as a character. I think the world is interesting. I like all of this enough to look past the bugs and glitches that I don’t expect from Sony first party games. I just wish this game didn’t waste large portions of my time between exciting story moments. I don’t even dislike the shooting or the driving; I just dislike the quantity of these elements. Days Gone has sold well. I expect and hope for a sequel. Just know that going into this game that there is a lot of tedious nonsense to pad out a really good game to make it feel more worth every dollar, much to its detriment. I want to give this game a better score because the best moments are so good, but the large portion of this game is so bloody tiring that I just can’t.
Review copy of game provided by publisher.
