Days Gone

An interesting game that unfortunately lasts way longer than it should. I loved the story, and the more human elements of the game, and the characters and plot felt very "real." The gameplay is fine, but not as deep as it should be for a game with this great storytelling, and also, a game of this length. I was sucked into this world by the amazing characters, but it greatly overstays its welcome. I wish it was maybe 10 - 15 hours shorter, and have more layered gameplay.

Taking place in a post-apocalyptic Oregon, two years after the start of a global pandemic, former outlaw turned drifter Deacon St. John discovers the possibility that his wife Sarah may still being alive -- which leads Deacon on a quest to find her. As an action-adventure and survival horror video game, Days Gone allows players to explore an open world environment while facing hostile humans and cannibalistic creatures known as Freakers. Originally slated for a 2018 launch, Days Gone was delayed several times, but ultimately praised for its gameplay and world design.

Days Gone is a game I remember being announced a while back, I think it was the 2016 E3, which was the same E3 Sony announced God of War, Marvel's Spider-Man, and Death Stranding, so Days Gone sort of got sidelined to those big titles, but it looked interesting, it was advertised as an open World zombie game focused on surviving and eliminating massive hordes of zombies and revolved heavily around an ex-biker gang member biking around the woods of Oregon. Well it ended up releasing 3 years later, and by that point everyone already played God of War and Spider-Man and were itching for a new Sony exclusive, and well, this ended up coming along and met mediocre reception from both user reviews and critics, many stated the biggest issues with the game were bugs and glitches, some which made the game unplayable. Well this made me wait and hold off playing until a year or so later I read people saying this game is an overlooked gem and that it was unfairly panned, and that the patches fixed most of the game breaking bugs and issues. Plus with Last of Us 2's leaks and divisive story, I decided to check this out now that the libraries have started opening back up where I live.

Well in terms of gameplay Days Gone is pretty much your standard 3rd person open World game. You have your stealth mechanics, your different guns, grenades, enemies camps and collectibles littered throughout the map. It felt almost too by the book in terms of its layout. To be honest, I felt Horizon did the whole open World concept better, the game is about traveling the map with your motorcycle to different areas and either fighting off human enemies or zombies. The problem is the motorcycle has somewhat poor handling and there is a gas limit, so if you are traveling and your bike runs out of gas, you either have to go to a camp and pay to refill it or find a gas can. There are usually gas cans in every enemy camp but, early in the game it gets so frustrating having to abandon my bike and wander off to look for a gas tank. Once you upgrade your bike tank it doesn't become a huge issue, but this is so annoying and almost makes the early game unbearable since you'll be needing to refill your gas almost once every 5-10 minutes of game time traveling.

In terms of combat this game is pretty bland too. You got human enemies, who are so generic and uninteresting that I don't even know why they bothered. I feel like every zombie game and movie/TV show they force in humans and try to make the analogy that hey look, the humans are more evil than the zombies, they are making chaos and killing each other and breaking off into different terrorist factions rather than fighting the common enemy. I mean maybe this is true and accurate in what would happen in real life if a zombie apocalypse were possible, but for once I'd like to see a zombie game or movie where humans aren't the bad guys and it just focuses entirely on the zombies, I mean I feel the human enemies were only added to this to add variety in the gameplay, but the AI is so poor that the human enemies just end up being boring and the least interesting part of the game. Often I could just go guns blazing into a camp and run away and shoot all the enemies in a camp from a distance and with a good rifle and sniper and full recovery items I didn't even have to worry about dying, and I played the game on hard mode.

The zombie enemies are a little better and their AI isn't as bad, but the zombie enemies start off tough, early game I was so afraid of biking through areas with lots of zombies, and at night there are more and they are more aggressive, And if I ever ran into a horde, I just rode my bike away as fast as I could. But later in the game when you upgrade your health and stamina and get better guns, zombies become a pushover too. By the end of the game I could take on zombie hordes with almost no grenades and still have enough ammo and healing without sweating too much. I think what made the zombie enemies kind of bland in this though was the lack of variety. You have your normal zombies that run, then later on you got brute zombies that are a bit more tanky but really aren't too tough, then you got zombies that scream and alert nearby zombies to your location, and you got children zombies that are weak and crawl at you. That's about it in terms of variety, and you'll only really see the main zombies since the other 3 kind are kind of rare. Then you got zombie wolves, zombie bears, and zombie crows, which are actually more annoying than they sound. The zombie wolves are one of the most annoying enemies in any game, they just randomly pop out and attack you out of nowhere and can knock you off your bike. The crows are also pretty annoying and don't add much. The bears are cool, but are pretty rare to find in the game.

Now in terms of glitches and issues, there are still plenty. Now I won't be too harsh, I didn't encounter any major bugs or glitches until my last 10 hours of playing this game. But the ones I encountered were pretty bad. The graphics and textures wouldn't load proper and there'd be floating trees and textures that looked like they were out a Playstation 1 game. This only happened in certain areas, and during a few cutscenes, but there was one time during a main mission I went in a cave and a zombie horde was supposed to spawn for the story and it never did. And I looked up online and it said this is a common glitch and that the only way to fix it is completely reset my PS4. Luckily resetting it worked and I only lost about 10 minutes, but still, that is inexcusable for a 2019 game. I never had a game glitch that bad that it made it in impossible to complete a story mission, even the PS3 Bathesda games never game me bugs that broke my game. Like I said, luckily this didn't happen until my final 10 hours, but once they started happening, it became more frequent.

Now in terms of story, thats probably where I have the biggest issue. The gameplay is generic but passable, the World is a bit too big for its own good, but it does give you a lot to explore, and even the lack of enemy variety isn't the worst since the game gives you tons of guns and grenades to play with, and hell I'll even forgive the annoying motorcycle driving and gas refilling, but the story of this game is just so bland and generic and the characters are so dull and underdeveloped. The story is mostly about a man named Deacon St. John who married a woman names Sarah who moved to Oregon to study plants. Well, things pretty much go to hell and Sarah gets injured and government scientists basically take his wife away and he stays behind with his biker friend named Boozer to help him survive. The game pretty much is Deacon and his friend Boozer going from camp to camp to work for the camp leaders and survive. The first two camps are actually pretty rushed and I think I finished both those segments of the story in less than 10 hours. The majority of the game takes place in the 3rd camp, where you run into some old friends you stayed with before. I felt like there were a lot of interesting characters in this game who had potential, but in the end there development goes nowhere and they are just used as a foil for Deacon. Even Boozer, who is one of the main characters and Deacon's best friend sort of vanishes after the first half of the game, and even in the first half he's spent bedridden for like a good chunk. That's actually the story for most characters, you're introduced to them, get few cutscenes or missions with them, then they disappear for the rest of the game with little to no interaction.

The only characters to really get any meaningful development were Deacon and his wife Sarah. And also I found Sarah to be poorly developed too. About halfway through the game Deacon finds out his wife is still alive and in a camp to the south and ends up reuniting, only for her to be very cold and unaffectionate and she ends up acting like Deacon isn't even her husband or that she is even relieved that he is still alive. I get that it was 2 years since they separated and she thought he was dead, plus the camp they were at prevented romantic relationships, but even when they rode off in private, they still were cold and formal until the final few missions, when she automatically is head over heals in love with him again. I feel like they handled this romance really poorly and it just feels like the developers of this don't understand basic human psychology. I mean plus they could have done interesting things, like what if Deacon decided to sleep with Rikki from the previous camp when he thought his wife was still dead and then by chance finds his wife and has to battle with the conflict of having fallen in love with a new woman and his wife who he was sure was dead. I feel the story goes the cliche, safe route, and that makes for a very boring and generic story. The most interesting parts of this game I felt were the flashbacks of Deacon in the past with Sarah, but those were just too few that they didn't really matter. I just felt all the characters in this game were wasted, and so many had potential but just were used to push Deacon forward rather than standing on their own. Theres also a character Deacon rescues who is a teenager named Lisa who ends up being innocent and not even knowing what the infection is, and somehow she is alive in her house 2 years later and survived just by staying in her house, and then at the end up the game after running off so much she ends up being
a hardened survivor with scars and can kill zombies like nothing. I feel like she was another wasted character but the developers did the cliche thing and did a 180 on her character to make her into some badass survivor instead of an innocent kid.

Now in terms of length, the game took me around 60-70 hours. It had points it just dragged out. The beginning of the game is a bit rushed in the first 2 camps, but then at the 3rd came I felt like they just kept giving me so many missions and most of the missions were repetitive, like go to this area with this character and take these zombies out or take these humans out. The last camp is like that two, as most missions are just going to areas and collecting items or taking out zombies. It doesn't help that the lack of enemy variety make these tedious too. The game does get better in the second half and the story does get a little more interesting, and you get better guns and become more powerful, but then the game starts becoming a bit too easy and the bike driving still is frustrating. I feel like the game just had too much to do and there were so many camps, side things to explore, and the main story dragged out that I felt like I'd play the game for days on end and make little progress. This game took me longer to beat than some RPGs and I actually was playing Xenoblade Chronicles on Switch the same time as this and that actually felt better paced and less dragged out than this game. Horizon proved you can make a good open World game without having overly big maps and having millions of quests and things to explore. This just feels like it has too much padding and getting from point A to point B can sometimes be tedious with the big map in this game and the poor bike handling. Often I'll try to use full speed on my bike only to clip something small and get knocked off my bike. This game just overstays its welcome by a good 15-20 hours. This is the kind of game that should only be 30-40 hours max. I think Horizon took my around 40 hours, this game took me about 20 hours longer with the side content. By the end of this game I was so burned on that I didn't really feel accomplished.

I mean overall, Days Gone has some cool ideas and it is one of the few open World zombie games, but it just falls into generic cliches with its World, story, and gameplay that it doesn't really find its own identity, and it just drags out too much at points and the biking just get tedious and isn't refined enough, and there are still annoying bugs that are somewhat game breaking. This game just needed another year or 2 to iron things out, but I do have hope a sequel can improve a lot. I hope the sequel can actually give the side character much needed development and maybe even let us play as them, there needs to be much more enemy variety, if there are human enemies at least make them more interesting and give them more variety and better AI, and make an open World that is more diverse and less empty space. Also add variety to the hordes because they just got too easy and repetitive since taking them out at the end was too easy and lacked variety. I have hope for a sequel but I hope the developers listened because this game didn't do much for me, even with some people saying it was overlooked. They have the elements, they just got to put them together the right way the next time around instead of putting them together slopily.