Review: Days Gone fails to be another big marquee title for Sony

Days Gone is a very interesting game, it’s a game that I genuinely hated when I started it a couple of weeks ago. The protagonist was weird, there were bugs and glitches out the wazoo, and the gameplay was doing nothing to capture me in a significant way beyond mindless shooting and stealthing.

That said, somehow, in my many hours of playtime, I’ve come around on it. I still have lots of issues with the open-world zombie title but by the time credits rolled, I found myself happy having played it instead of feeling like it was a waste of time.

DISCLAIMER: A review copy was provided by the publisher.

Platform: PlayStation 4

Developers: Sony Bend

Publisher: Sony

MSRP: $59.99

Release Date: April 26th, 2019

A typical zombie story held up by its incredible characters and themes

Days Gone follows biker outlaw and former veteran Deacon St. John two years after an epidemic destroys America. On the night of the zombie outbreak, he is separated from his wife as he attempts to get her to safety and he makes a vow that he’ll see her again. After spending months looking for her, he makes the assumption that she’s probably long gone but he still holds out hope that just maybe… she’s still out there.

Add in some relatively generic zombie story plot elements such as crazy factions and leaders, camps fighting for survival, and more and you get the story of Days Gone. Truthfully, it feels like the best non-Telltale Walking Dead game you could ask for.

There were very few moments in the story that surprised me, it’s largely what you expect and it never does anything to particularly wow you with the overall narrative but that’s ok, it holds its own. The game is held up by the quality of the writing, its characters, and the performances of the actors (specifically Sam Witwer as St. John). They escalate this rather by the numbers story into something emotionally gripping because they make you believe in the stakes and their struggle.

St. John initially weirded me out, when the game starts, he’s super unhinged and largely unlikable. He walks into enemy camps and starts talking to himself about how he’s going to do very violent things to them and talks really fast and quietly under his breath like a psycho. Granted, he’s been through a lot so it’s somewhat understandable but it’s super hammy and made me laugh more than anything.

At the start of Days Gone, he feels like a guy who would violently thrash a McDonald’s employee for putting cheese on his burger when he specified no cheese. By the middle and even then end, he grew on me as character significantly. The less isolated he becomes, the more human and likable he seems to be. He still has an unhinged nature but it’s channeled properly to find a rightful balance.

As noted already, the story is a mish-mash of zombie stories we’ve already seen and feels like a spin-off of The Walking Dead at times. The one big throughline that helps keep it feeling fresh is the arc with Deacon and his search for his wife, it makes a tale of desperation and darkness have a compelling angle of love and hope.

You’ll do missions in the present day to crack the mystery of her fate as well as trigger flashback sequences which showcase stages of their relationship such as them meeting and the evolution of their love. This could’ve easily been cheesy but it’s essential to Days Gone’s narrative and it helps you feel motivated as a player to get closure for Deacon.

Days Gone has lots of heart in its bleakness, it makes the moments of peace and tranquility feel meaningful and impactful. It makes you yearn for those (pardon the pun) days gone. The days where everything was right in the world and the need to bring the world back to that.

There could’ve been an unhealthy amount of edge to a story like this but it juggles darkness and levity incredibly well, building solid themes and meaningful motivation for everyone involved.

The story crumbles in on its need to pad the game with unneeded fat

Even knowing that, there are times where Days Gone’s mission structure is very bad. There are a lot of missions in this game and while that’s fine, there’s tons of fat that could’ve been trimmed and had little to no consequence to the rest of the story.

There are flashback sequences with Deacon and his wife, Sarah, where they strip control from you and you watch for 5 – 10 minutes. It’s not even just a cutscene all the time which would be more enjoyable to watch, it’s gameplay of Deacon riding the bike with Sarah on the back but you’re not controlling it. So it looks stiff, awkward, and feels presented in a strange way.

There are also many cutscenes in this game that will fade to black and then start a new one right away in a new location or situation, making you feel like there was a playable section that was completely removed.

One particular storyline that feels like a complete waste of time and would have no impact on the story whatsoever if it was removed is one involving a little girl that Deacon finds in a town. This should be one of the most interesting and emotionally engaging parts of the story and it starts off that way but she repeatedly finds herself in situations that require you to have to go find her several times.

She’s annoying and a huge burden to the player and the resolution to the arc is ultimately used to be a coincidence that helps Deacon out of a sticky situation. It could be rewritten in minutes to find a different solution for him in that situation and then cut her whole story out and nothing is lost. She’s used exclusively as a way to raise stakes but in reality, it undercuts the drama by doing the same unoriginal trick over and over again.

There are a bunch of other missions that feel like padding such as tons of fetch quests that see you going out and getting an MP3 player for a character, gathering resources, and much more. These aren’t side quests, they’re main quests, and they can be super bland and kill the pacing of the story immensely.

There’s also a storyline which requires Deacon to stealth through multiple areas of guards without harming them or alerting them and eavesdrop on a character. This would be fine if it happened once or twice but this happens probably five times or more as separate missions and they’re just as bad as those trailing missions in old Assassin’s Creed games.

You’ll feel like the story is moving at a very sluggish pace up until the third act, feeling like no significant events are happening consistently enough to propel the plot forward. It ends up feeling like the game is narratively running in place and only sometimes picking up the momentum to move itself forward a tiny bit.

If you were looking for a really fun, gripping moment to moment experience with Days Gone, you may be let down. The gameplay is painfully by the numbers, doing nothing remotely interesting or evolving past formulas.

A gameplay experience that fails to strive beyond driving and zombie killing

Almost everything in Days Gone has been done in elsewhere and it has been done leagues better. The two strong suits it has going for it are driving the bike and the hordes. The bike is obviously quite crucial to this open world as it’s your only means of travel besides walking and if it was bad, well the whole game would probably fall apart.

It has just the right amount of weight and heft to it in its handling to make it feel like a proper chopper that gracefully weaves between trees, cars, and swarms of the undead. Building it up from scratch and making it your own versatile tool is incredibly rewarding and is a really satisfying form of progression.

I never found it to be too much trouble to maintain, I ran out of gas a few times (usually only after fast traveling a long distance as it consumes gas to fast travel) and the bike broke once or twice from my own incompetence. When your bike does break down, you realize how crucial it is to your survival and it raises the tension of navigating the dangers of post-apocalyptic Oregon significantly.

When I was searching for fuel at one point, I was miles away from my bike and I turned a corner to find a couple zombies. I took them out and then one zombie walked out from behind a building, and then another… and then another… and then a dozen more… and then several dozen more… and then hundreds more.

When the horde strikes, it’s an incredibly visceral moment. Your mind goes through several stages in mere seconds with “Ah, I can take these guys” to “Oh my god, why did I think I could take these guys”. It’s an overwhelming feeling of intensity that few other zombie games have ever managed to nail and fighting the big hordes is where the otherwise very average gameplay shines.

You create gaps to give yourself a few seconds to unload a clip to thin their numbers, you craft bombs and molotovs as you sprint to toss behind you, you find ways to get them to clump up and lure them into traps, and much more. It’s incredibly fun to fight the hordes and can be a gratifying experience regardless of if you extensively plan it out or just wing it.

The problem is, you’re probably not going to be fighting hordes until the end of the game or after you’ve finished it as they’re tough and require a lot of resources and skills to take on. So, you’re stuck with really bad gunfights between enemies who have terrible AI for about 90% of the game.

Shooting your guns doesn’t have the oomph it needs to, it should feel brutal, heavy, and match the tone and aesthetic of the world Sony Bend has created. My powerful pump action shotgun shouldn’t take 3 shots to someone’s head to kill a guy, there should be more weight to every element of the combat but instead it feels light and too loose.

There’s a lack of any kind of satisfying feedback. There’s no notable impact sounds, no animations outside of QTEs that give you a sense of the damage and danger of the situation, and there’s no significant blood and gore in gameplay to create that feeling of brutality this world so desperately tries to depict.

Add to the fact that there’s a strange approach to how dynamic combat can be. You’ll constantly be wanting to experiment with the toys you’re given but may find yourself really disappointed with the results. I tried to lure a horde towards a big semi with a gas tanker on the back and then the plan was to blow it up.

Turns out, the game only allows you to blow up a very specific gas tanker so if you shoot the ones that aren’t designed to be blown up… you’ll be met with a giant tube filled with bullet holes and no big boom.

I constantly found myself wondering what type of game I was playing. Is Days Gone an action game or a stealth game? Because it does neither of those things particularly well but tries to do both of them frequently. You can be sneaking through a base with guys 15 feet away from you not being alerted despite making eye contact one minute and then mowing down dozens of people with an AR the next, hardly giving any thought to your ammo count.

The Last of Us has moments of action but it’s largely a stealth experience, when it has action, it keeps you grounded in the world it has created by giving you limited resources. Your bullets matter, your crafting resources could be the difference between life or death, and so on. It has tension, stakes, and lots of thought poured into each combat scenario.

In Days Gone, you have tons of bullets and can even get a bike upgrade that allows you to regularly refill your inventory on the go so you don’t have that sense of desperation. Everything about the game’s moment to moment gameplay is jarring and confusing, never making a striking impression or finding something to really truly call its own.

On a surface level, it’s tolerable but it’ll likely never grab you in a way that makes you really want to play it when you’re away from your console. It does what it needs to do to make sure you’re not bored but I wouldn’t say you’re going to always be having “fun” while playing it.

Sometimes a game works by just being mere comfort food and not excelling at anything particular but Days Gone struggles to find any footing in its uninspired nature.

Just as many bugs as there are zombies

Days Gone is probably one of the hardest reviews I’ve done, not because the game is difficult but because it was immensely buggy and broken when I got it. I’ve only played a few games that have felt so unpolished at this level.

I fell through the world, enemies fell through the world when I tried to stealth kill them and then they’d pop back out and alert the base, enemies clipped through walls, I got locked in an animation where I was falling for several minutes, my bike’s engine would stop making noise so all that you could hear was the tires against moving awkwardly against the dirt, and much, much more.

There have been several patches to fix Days Gone since then but outside of just “bug fixes” and things like mission completions not triggering being fixed, I don’t know what’s still specifically broken. What I do know specifically is that the game’s performance issues are still somewhat present despite being a huge step-up form what it used to be.

If you played for extended periods of time, all of the textures would just not render at all and would stay like this for hours. It became a blurry, gross mess. I’ve been told the cases of this have been “reduced” but I did have one more instance of this toward the end of the game after this patch released.

There’s also a huge problem with the frame-rate still where large hitches will occur where you’ll drop below 20 FPS and the game becomes a stuttering mess, this can happen during combat, riding the bike, or just walking around doing nothing. It’s very frequent and still happens as of writing this on April 24th, 2019 (three days before launch).

An effort is being made to patch these issues so be aware and check the patch notes before buying to see if it’s up to your standards in terms of polish.

The Verdict

As it stands, Days Gone isn’t some abomination but it’s not up to par with what we expect from a Sony first party game. It’s held up primarily by its story which still fails to match the quality of other PS4 titans like Spider-Man or God of War but the game’s biggest downfalls come from barebones gameplay and a disturbing lack of polish.

If Sony Bend got another chance at bat with this IP, there’s extreme potential to make something worthwhile with the foundation laid here. Using lessons learned here and building off the strongest elements could result in a really great sequel on PlayStation 5 that stands tall among Sony’s other first party titles.