Days Gone

 

Days Gone is a major AAA high budget game which was originally released on PS5 which seemed like it was supposed to be a console seller and main draw to owning said system. Its this post-apocalyptic, third person zombie looter, shooter, and predominately features motorcycles. You can gather all this just from staring at the box art or game pages. Eventually, it was released on Steam. And I ended up picking it up on a good sale, being a high budget game, post apocalyptic, and third person was all I needed to be allured.

The game starts up asking you what difficulty, it seems as if theres two categories. Theres Easy, Normal, Hard, Very hard essentially. Then theres another category which is about Hardcore and more focused in on survival features. To me, this "Hardcore" settings seems to be intended for people who've already beaten the game. So I opted to just use the default difficulty, Normal mode.

The game is very narrative and story driven. It has a decently long series of introduction cutscenes showing you the premise that the world has turned to shit, some viral disease has broken out which turns everyone into crazed zombies (called Freakers in the game universe). And these arent the slow shambling type of zombies, nope, they're the run super fast and have various mutations types. The game opens up with you on a rooftop, about to escape on helicopter with your wife and biker friend Boozer, your wife is stabbed and the helicopter can only hold one more person, so you send her off and then thats when the game opens up and the gameplay begins. The game has a strong polished, cinematic high budget touch to it. The presentation in particular is gripping, the story characters are interesting, and I found myself wanting to know more and more about whats taking place in this game world. You play as Deacon St. John, a sort of "bad boy" Biker outlaw, acting as a "Drifter" in this world, just roaming from place to place doing what you can to survive.

Shortly after the game opens up, it teaches you about a few fundamental mechanics it expects you to learn and use. You get introduced to basic combat, shooting a few zombies in a tunnel, then you learn about molotovs and burning Nests - these places where zombies like to hold up to hibernate, it turns out you optionally can  destroy these nests placed around the open world in various places, in order to conveniently fast travel. If you don't destroy some nests, you wont be able to fast travel to a place which uses the same road. More on this later. You get introduced to driving your motorbike, which is a big part of the game, as its the primary mode of transportation. There are no other vehicles in the game, as it turns out. They just focused in on one vehicle type, and refined it as much as possible. And from there Boozer gets in an incident with these crazed out cult members called Rippers, who inflict self-harm, and worship pain and everything that is bad, as the ultimate good. They hold him down and try to burn his arm off with a blowtorch. You save him, and then the rest of the first quarter of the game is spent roaming around the open world doing various tasks and quests to help your wounded friend. It's a good setup, the plot, writing, characters, dialogue, and main character are all engaging, intriguing, and even likable.

The game is setup not too dissimilar from other Open world games, it operates much like any other Grand Theft Auto game, except theres only one vehicle here, and its the post-apocalypse. However, the first big gripe I had with the game was the difficulty of figuring out exactly what the main quest was. You see, in the menu there is a "Storylines" tab. This gives you a list of different storylines you can follow, of various different colors. Red, brown,  yellow, green, etc. It's not made super clear which one is the actual main quest, and what are just optional random side quests. I was so lost and frustrated for the first handful of hours I started Googling how to figure out what the damn Main quest is out of all these. I was still lost. You see, it seemed like the Yellow markers are the Main quests, right? but I would keep getting to parts where they just stopped showing up. Then I would go out of my way to do a Side quest, and suddenly a new Yellow quest turned out. Which massively confused me. Do I have to do side quests to get more main quests? I thought. But no, it turns out, that in order to get more Main quests, you simply have to leave any outpost and just roam around the world for a minute or two, and you'll usually get a radio call which gives you a new quest. If you stand in town, they'll never happen. This was all very confusing, and actually frustrating, and poorly laid out. Once I finally understood how to actually just progress the main story, it got better.

So you just go around opening the Main map, which is useful and detailed, picking a Yellow quest, and trying to move yourself towards it with your bike. Heres the thing, you cannot always fast travel, under a few conditions: You cant fast travel if you dont have enough Gas. You can't fast travel if there is a Nest blocking the road. You cant fast travel in combat, and so on. Another annoyance and gripe I sort of had in the early game was with the Bike mechanics. Running out of gas in the middle of nowhere,with shit guns having to spend 30 minutes slowly crouching around looking for a gas tank, got kind of old. Especially when you die over and over trying to do so. Your bike also takes damage, and can be totally broken out in the wild as well. You cant fast travel if your bike is broken, or out of gas. So a few times I found myself just doing these annoying errands trying to upkeep my bike just so I could traverse through the open world towards the next quest. And theres a lot of shit that gets in your way from doing just that. Besides the gas/repairs, you'll have random animals like Wolves or Bears, Cheetahs (?) out of nowhere pounce on you and tear you off your bike. You'll have enemy Bandit snipers sniping you from across the map, making you fly off your bike and often destroying it, requiring repairs. You'll have traps on the road which knock you off the bike, bandit ambushes, and so on. These are all cool and exciting the first few times they happen, but when you're just trying to push through the open world and get onto the next Story mission, it gets a little annoying. I'm not sure what else they could have done to improve it, its not necessarily bad, and yes the open world needs to have some danger and engagement in it, but sometimes it just felt like pointless busywork. Although it does add to the survival immersion, I suppose.

The main combat mechanics of the game are modern, polished, and refined. At first the game may come across like a harsh survival experience, but its not really quite true. For one, the game has a very forgiving autosave system, where almost anything you do, the game will save. Any bit of quest progress or mission progress you make, the game usually saves, meaning you never really go back very far. Often times if you die, you just respawn at the last checkpoint which is often just a minute or so behind. There is no regenerating health, which is a welcome design choice compared with these over saturated generic contemporary games. Instead you must craft bandages, which is done from holding a button to bring up a menu wheel, which in turn drastically slows down the time in slow-motion to give you a chance to dig around the menu. The inventory  menus are...a bit questionable. They have branching sub-menus that can feel cumbersome and clunky to navigate, often times if you screw up you have to redo the entire process, losing precious moments during a heated battle. Thankfully you can just press a button to Heal without digging through the menu's each time, which is what I always did. You can carry something like 8 health items at one time, too, and they arent hard to come by in the world, be it through other killed humans, or just laying around the world, even from places like breaking the lock of Ambulances to find Med-kits inside.

Most of the general scavenging is picking up items to be used for crafting from the inventory wheel. Usually explosives like Molotovs, Pipe bombs, or even Distraction devices (That I never used much). There is a convenient feature where you press a button and it highlights all possible items near you for a few moments, which makes looting less annoying than it otherwise could be. But don't mistake this game for a real Survival experience, the items you'll be savaging don't matter much more than just crafting a few consumables or explosives. The game isn't very harsh on resources, either. Maybe in the beginning when you can only carry 30 or so bullets its a bit challenging, but its not like a Resident Evil game where you have to be afraid to waste any ammo - no, you can frequently find police vehicles which guaranteed have ammo boxes, as well as easily having enough money to constantly refill your ammo and Gas at any camp which you can fast travel to. I think they did strike a good balance with the resource distribution, though, there certainly are times where youre down to your last handful of bullets and you need to prioritize getting careful headshots, so it does instill that tension in you that you need to manage yourself carefully, but also not make resources completely meaningless.

The main combat experience uses one Primary weapon (Shotguns, Single shot rifles, Assault rifles,)  one Sidearm (Pistols, small machine gun, short shotguns)  and one Special weapon category (Snipers, LMG's,). Also you can have one Melee weapon you can craft or find in the world, which degrades as you use it So its quite limited in terms of what you can carry, but realistic and immersive. A nice touch is that you can see the weapons hanging off your back, as well as basically all of the games animations are smooth and impressive and realistic. (Well, the rag doll physics are pretty goofy and glitchy often, thats one area that doesnt look polished). An interesting feature of the Third-person shooting mechanics is that each weapon type has a different crosshair, as well as this crosshair getting more tight the longer you have your aim up. It rewards you for aiming, then waiting as the crosshair tightens, then shooting if you really want to dial in the accuracy. Its a fun little "dance" you have to do to ensure accuracy, and it makes the gunplay satisfying and rewarding and skillful as a result. It gives hit indicators when you shoot enemies, Red meaning kill shot, so it makes it even more satisfying to try to hone in on those headshots. The different crosshair types are: The single shot rifle has a typing cross style, except they deliberately made the crosshair grey so its really hard to see, something I've noticed other contemporary games do, as a way to seemingly prevent the weapon from being too overpowered, I don't know, I dont like stuff like that, its kinda cheap and lazy in a way. But regardless, its interesting in that it tries to add significant pros and cons to each weapon choice. Assault rifles, for instance, have a more broader open cross, which makes it hard to get the fine grain shots off, as the crosshair brackets dont move in very close even if you wait awhile. Shotguns are more of a big open brackets. And "Special" weapon category, such as the RPD also uses big brackets, rewarding spraying moreso than fine accuracy. Then you have Sniper Rifles, which use the typical zoomed in scope view with breath holding mechanics. The human enemy AI is varied according to what group they're a part of, too. For instance the Rippers are more berserk, and care less about self-preservation and will mostly just blindly charge right up to you trying to slaughter you. But Bandits, and other humans (Later on Milita) can use advanced tactics, flanking, and are constantly calling out strategies to their teammates which is fun to listen to and coordinate around. The human combat is mostly heavily cover based, if you stand out in the open for more than a few seconds you'll get shredded. Its moreso this careful wack-a-mole style gameplay where you hide behind some object, use the camera to peek around and look for bodies, jump out for a second and fire, then every so often change positions as you need to get closer or further away. Sometimes they'll toss grenades at you, which is fun and forces you to mix things up. You have useful combat moves such as a button to Roll, a button to quickly jump up on mostly any object and climb, and while Sprinting you have a button to quickly slide into cover, which is very fun and handy. You can loot random supplies off enemy bodies, and also pickup their weapon that you get to keep for as long as you want, although I think its lower quality than some of the weapons you can Permanently buy and put in your Locker. (I'm not sure how the quality system worked, I just know I saw some weapons say Poor quality and others say better in the weapon shops at towns..I never really noticed a difference)

The game also features a slow-motion aiming ability, you press a button and you get a few moments of slow motion to be able to more easily line up shots. By default this slowmo window is tiny, but you can permanently increase it by unlocking the right item (more on that later). I heavily relied on this slowmotion ability during combat, and found it quite enjoyable. Maybe just because I was playing with a Controller, so I needed the extra help, I don't know. But its a nice feature and adds a bit more depth to the combat system, trying to figure out when the best time to use the slow motion is, and waiting for it to regenerate.

Its not a super complex or deep combat system, but its engaging and satisfying enough, the overall presentation of the games Graphical fidelity and immersion makes it never get dull, especially because of the variety of enemies you come across. There are boss fights, Bear fights, all sorts of different human factions, late game you come across Milita that are heavily armored, its exciting to see what weapons each new group will be using. For most of the game I used Single shot rifles such as the M14 and later on Lever action rifle, coupled with either a Sniper special weapon and late game used the RPD which is a crazy LMG with a drum round magazine that was fun to use, especially during zombie hordes.

Then you have the actual zombies, the main thing the game revolves around. Unlike other games, where the zombies tend to act like minor nuances, in this game these things are no joke. Visually they look gross and scary, especially if you zoom in with binoculars, the texture and model work is gruesomely detailed. Especially in the first half of the game or so you can barely take on more than 3 of these at once, either because you just wont have enough ammo to spare, or because your guns arent proper for the job, such as using a bolt action rifle. They are hard to hit. They run straight at you, but they actually try to dodge bullets! They flinch and move so erratically its hard to line up a shot, let alone headshots. Sometimes they even do this flinching move to try to move out of the way of your bullets. Its good that the zombies are a genuine threat instead of a minor nusance, its lame when a zombie game has zombies that barely matter. But here, I found myself more often than not trying to sneak around them instead of having to deal with them head on, because theyre so threatening, which further adds to the atmosphere and immersion. Of course there are stealth kills, you just get close enough tap a button and get an instant kill takedown animation, which is fun and useful. Even shooting at these zombies often times they dont even flinch and keep coming. Only headshots are a reliable way to take them down, early game body shots do almost nothing, not even stun them for a moment. Then you have different types of zombies too, like Newts, which are actual children turned zombie that don't really attack you unless you invade their territory or get too close, they kind of just stalk you from rooftops and scurry around in a disturbing fashion. Its bold of this game to involve killing swarms of children, it adds to the horror and disturbing nature of the apocalypse. Then later on in the game you have all sorts of other types of zombies, these giant Hulking ones that take dozens of bullets and are pretty self explainatory. Then you have these ones called Reachers, which run super fast and can almost disappear for a moment, also taking dozens of bullets. And theres Screamers, which scream at you causing these weird psychedelic effects. And most surprising of all, you have these roaming gigantic Hordes of zombies that you can come across dynamically in the open world, as well as part of mandatory main quests. These are like thousands of zombies which is an impressive sight to behold, if they run at you, you'd better have your bike nearby because otherwise theres no escape. The zombies are well done, and add a nice element of horror, but these Hordes can be questionable. For instance theres a few parts during the story where its mandatory you defeat an entire horde, and these were just downright frustrating and confusing. Super hard and annoying. I don't know what the intended way to do this is, I know you're supposed to use these Napalm grenades the game gives you, but it just doesn't seem to do much when I use them. 

It takes like 15 minutes of careful playing to take down this entire horde, theres like a Horde health bar on top of the screen which tracks your progress. But just one minor mistake and you have 100 zombies on top of you and its over, it just got to be so frustrating. The only way I got past these horde sections was by basically using exploits and cheesing them. Like one Story mission has you clearing out basically an entire town of zombies by yourself, the only way I was able to do it was by jumping on some small building near Gas station which had broken zombie pathing and they couldnt get to me easily so I just camped and killed them all. Another one which is the second last mission in the game has you clearing out a Saw mill of a horde, again, I tried over and over, probably more than a dozen attempts. Eventually the only way I was able to beat it was by being cheap and using a sort of exploit by attacking them, running away on my bike, driving away and Saving (You can quicksave at your bike), and then coming back, rinse repeat. Its sad that I could only do it by being cheap, but I was just so frustrated I wanted it over with. I'm sure I'm missing something in how to properly do it, I know you have to get them into tight places and slow them down and funnel them, I just cant do it.

That brings me onto the Stats and Skills aspect of the game, the sort of RPG-lite elements these Open world games usually have. In Days Gone you have 3 skill trees. Melee, Ranged, and Survival. I mostly avoided the Melee branch, as I just preferred to want to specialize more into guns. The trees are pretty self explanatory, simple, but satisfying to work towards the unlocks. Stuff like More stamina regeneration rate, more accuracy,faster reload speed, make less noise, easy to understand but fun to work towards. There are a few particularly interesting gamechanging ones though, such as Headshots give health. Each skill tree works in tiers, so to be able to get skills in tier 2 you must unlock a certain amount in the first tier, and so on. Its a basic system, but I think the game does benefit from its inclusion.
Then you have NERO Injectors. These are permanent buffs that you can find scattered around the game world in these White crates, usually inside marked Nero checkpoints on the map, but sometimes not near them at all. Once you get one of these, you have three options: More health, More stamina, More slow-motion.

Now, I'm starting to think maybe the reason I had so much trouble with the zombie hordes is because I almost entirely ignored getting permanent Stamina upgrades. I figure, stamina isn't that big of a deal, because I'm driving the bike most times, and the default stamina is just enough. So at first I focused on Health upgrades, of course you can't go wrong there, right? And later on, once I felt my health was adequate, I focused entirely on Slow-mo upgrades. But then came these mandatory defeat the horde sections where sprinting was really important, so maybe I screwed myself over there, don't know. Still, it was fun and exciting to go around looking for these Nero injectors to buff the character. Though, sometimes they can be annoying as hell because the doors are locked and it usually requies you to go find Gas and the Generator to turn on the power and open the doors. Well, sometimes I would spent a dozen minutes or more just looking for the damn Gas or generator, I feel like they could of been more lenient with putting the icons on your minimap once you're close enough to avoid this frustrating waste of time.

The games quests usually involve arriving at some Town, meeting all the people there, and then doing various errands for them. Usually stuff like taking out an enemy bandit camp, or going and finding some item for them, rescuing someone, tracking down a thief or murderer, a lot of them are combat heavy, turning into these fun third person shooter segments which has heavy emphasis on using cover. The game doesnt really have a dedicated cover system, but you crouch by a wall and he kind of automatically situates himself. Theres a bunch of explosive and edge of your seat moments throughout the campaign, but its mostly because the narrative, story, plot, characters are so gripping. Without the ups and downs and the intensity of the story, I'm not sure if the missions would be all that amazing by themselves. But in context it makes for a really compelling experience. There are even a handful of Bike related missions where you have to chase someone down on your bike, and capture them alive. This is a fun little racing type sequence where you have to keep up with the enemy, shoot at him from your bike with this nifty lockon system, and ram into him until he falls off and then a cutscene plays where you tie him up and call your allies to come get him. Through the story it gradually introduces new types of monsters and human enemies as well. As mentioned previously, you have the Rippers cult, which is a fascinating and exciting foe. They run around half naked with scars all over, saying their cult phrases, tormenting anyone that comes in their path and trying to force them to join. The first maybe half of the campaign is spent dealing between these guys and Zombies. Its a great pacing that works well, going from missions based around zombies, to then human focused missions, often times both mixing together in chaotic moments.

Early on you do a lot of tasks for Copelands camp, going and doing bounties, and fixing up your bike. Because the game starts you off with a crappy bike, where you slowly have to build it up at the mechanics around the world. It gives a nice sense of progression slowly turning your bike from a piece of junk into something awesome. Each camp around the game world has their own money, too, so it makes this interesting dynamic between building up one camp or the other. Camps have different weapons you can purchase from the merchants, as well as sometimes different bike parts. You can turn in Ears at the bounty collector, for money and Trust. Increasing Trust level unlocks more weapons and bike parts. By killing zombies you automatically collect their ears.

Midway into the game you do a lot of tasks for Iron Mike and his encampment. Each camp has its own distinct look and feel, and the locations the game takes you on are generally quite memorable. At the beginning youre in this watchtower base with you and your wounded friend Boozer, but then you start branching out to other camps, and eventually you even settle in at Iron Mikes camp, sleeping and doing tasks from there as your main hub. The game has a good sense of progression, and takes you all across the open world in interesting places. Maybe another gripe I had with the game is that it always felt dark, night time. It seemed as like 75% of the time , the game was taking place at night time. I know you can sleep to pass time, but just starting missions would automatically turn it back to night time. So sometimes it just wasnt that interesting to look around because it was so grey and dark. But as I kept playing I got more day time tasks so I could really appreciate the graphics and scenic Oregon moments. The game world is wonderfully crafted, in terms of visuals. You have times when it starts snowing, coating the land, other times where you go on some tall mountains looking over the incredible draw distances, the lighting systems and reflections are great, but most of all the character models, and cutscenes are stellar.

Probably the greatest part of the experience is the plot, story, characters, writing, and voice acting. I'm not here to do a story review, but it has tons of twists and turns, and keeps you on the edge of your seat the whole time wanting to know what happens next. The characters are all memorable, likable or hateable like Skizzo, the characters have complex traits and arent entirely generic cliches either. The main character, Deacon, is a sarcastic, edgy, but down to earth likable guy, Boozer is unforgettable, and gives the game this comfy feeling of surviving the apocalypse with your bros. Everytime a cutscene happened, I cared enough to not want to miss a moment. I rarely care about stories in video games, but in Days Gone its very well done and one of the greatest video game stories in recent times. It takes you through the game world in a fun way, and makes all of your tasks feel like they have purpose and meaning. Even if sometimes you are just doing simple fetch quests, the weight of the narrative behind it makes it fun and enjoyable.

In the last section of the game, for instance, you find your wife is actually still alive at a Milita base, and you have to join them to see whats going on. This takes you to an entirely separate section of the map, its like another whole map to explore. This place is more barren, deserty, like everything torched to the ground, and is a great change of pace and really refreshes the whole experience up to that point. Well its very intriguing suddenly actually finding your wife and being a part of this creepy religious Milita bent on being the savior of the world with a Jesus complex. The gameplay from this point consists of doing a bunch of fetch quests for your wife, but also going on outings with her to infiltrate some big research lab, and take out all the hostiles there. As well as a bunch of other missions where shes by your side fighting with you. Finally the game wraps up by the Milita going really bad, wanting to head North to kill "all the degenerates and lowlife scum" which are basically all your friends in the other camps. So you go on a bunch of missions creating a plan to take them down, get your wife back, and escape. Its a roller coaster of emotions and events, that kept me having fun and interested the whole time.

After the story ends, you're free to roam the map as typical in open world games, and go around completing all the side "stories" and optional tasks, taking out nests, finding collectables, and so on. The game does have a ton of side missions, but I didn't do many. Maybe one day I'll go back and do them all, there are even optional timed missions that you can miss if you dont do them fast enough, which was an interesting little touch I noticed. The game has tons of cutscenes, and I wouldnt even be opposed to going back and trying to find as many of them as possible and learn more about the lore of the world and all the characters.

So while there were times when I was almost hating the game, with in the beginning the frustration of not understanding how to do the main story, with running out of gas and being stuck in shitty checkpoint loops trying to get some, with some of the Nest moments where I'll run around for 30 minutes trying to find the damn nest, because it isnt forgiving enough about showing you the icon on the minimap (atleast he says it smells bad when youre close, but the radius should be bigger) - there are lots of little annoyances and frustrations the game has, thats for sure. Still, the narrative and general exciting tasks the game sets you on, the intense firefights and the way the game is constantly introducing new threats and interesting characters, factions, and mutations, upgrading your bike, unlocking things at different camps, seeing what happens in the story and all the characters, the high graphical fidelity and impressive game world - it  makes for a rewarding and fun game to play through. It is a very long game, too, so you get your money's worth. It took me 30 hours to finish it, and I think compared to others I rushed it. I just didnt do that many optional quests, because I already knew its a long game. This is the kind of game where I would actually consider to get all the achievements, so there you go. Its good. It's a shame, I just looked up if Days Gone will have a sequel, and it says its been cancelled. What the hell? Thats so sad. Its setup so perfectly for sequels. I hope a sequel happens at some point.

8/10