Days Gone Review - A Beautiful Ride That Turns Into A Bumpy Road

Written by Chris Woodside  on April 25, 2019

Reviews: The only zombie survival game where the repetitive tasks and stealth missions eat more of your brain cells than the zombies.

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With the next generation of consoles just around the corner, many high profile games seem to be still a bit away as we await more powerful machines. As we enter the twilight era of this current generation, Sony proves they still have a few more tricks up their sleeves with their latest exclusive, Days Gone. While Days Gone doesn’t quite live up to the extremely high standards set by some previous juggernaut exclusives released on the Playstation, it still provides players with a satisfying gameplay loop and an engaging story in a genre that has struggled to provide gamers with substantial innovations in recent years.

On the surface level, a game taking place in the not too distant future in a post apocalyptic world that has been overrun with zombies does not seem like it would have much of an opportunity to thrive in the Playstation ecosystem. After the massive critical success of The Last of Us and the impending sequel to that game, it would be a herculean task to try and live up to the inevitable comparisons that will be made between the two games. However, my experience with Days Gone proved promising specifically because of the fact the developers over at Bend Studio have painstakingly crafted their own unique world in a game that looks, sounds, and plays in a uniquely different way from Sony’s other flagship franchise by putting a heavier emphasis on survival mechanics over a dramatic story.



Set in the Pacific Northwest, players control Deacon St. John, a scruff biker turned outlaw, a type of character that seems to always appear somehow in the post apocalyptic genre. While Deacon’s character is not actively unlikeable, and has some endearing moments, I found him more often that not being overshadowed by some other auxiliary characters that seemed to steal their scenes and stick out more the him. The lack of customization options available for Deacon also play a part in failing to give players an opportunity to play a role in Deacon’s development as a character and kept me feeling a bit detached from him.

The story that Deacon serves as the centerpiece of is very uneven. I actually felt the setup of the story was quite strong, if somewhat predictable and unoriginal for the genre. Beyond the opening hour, however, the story seemed to drag on without a clear direction, and its pacing often felt like it was all over the place. Some very dramatic (and to be fair, entertaining) missions were followed what felt more like side quests or fetch quests. Any momentum the story built with these larger scale missions immediately crashed shortly after. This was true from some of the early hours of the game, when you are sent on a fairly large mission to retrieve some important supplies. You have a tense moment when you discover the camp you thought you cleared of bandits and outlaws actually had someone still there that you nearly come to blows with. It seemed as though the story was building towards a powerful early moment, but the narrative was immediately broken by the next quest where you had to investigate a small area and proceed to have a short pursuit via your bike.



All this is to say the story of Days Gone is not bad, but as you approach the end of the nearly 25-30 hour campaign, the story becomes so predictable and formulaic that I was looking forward to getting to the end of it so I could go off and explore the open world, which I happened to enjoy a lot more than the core story narrative.

The worst part of the Days Gone mission structure by far were the tedious and frustrating stealth pursuit missions. These missions (which appeared far more than I expected throughout the story), took some of the worst features of stealth mechanics from the previous console generation (made famous mostly from the Assassin’s Creed series). Many of these missions feature automatic fail states if you are caught (lazily justified by the fact that the NERO agents have impenetrable armor making them invincible). The automatic fail states, along with the agonizingly long amount of time you need to be hidden to wait for the conversation you are eavesdropping on to end lead to these missions feeling not only repetitive, but also a chore. This would not have been as bad if these were some sort of side mission available in the world of Days Gone, but these missions served as the gate behind one of the most important aspects and lore of the story. Gatekeeping these larger secrets of the game’s world behind the worst missions in the game was a large part of what took so much steam out of the game’s narrative.

The open world of Days Gone suffers from some of the most common problems that have plagued open world games for decades now. Repetitive mission structures and long distances of travel (which sometimes is coupled with very slow travel speed) are all present here and can take its toll, but I didn’t find them to be huge issues. Even though many of the side objectives are similar and require the player to do various tasks, I was able to spread out my time between the open world and the main narrative, that they always felt fresh to a degree. Even if I was doing the same task for the tenth time, it proved to be a welcome break from the story. The progression system is also heavily tied to reward the player for going off the beaten track and taking care of some of these side objectives, which provided a useful and effective feedback loop for encouraging me to complete these repetitive tasks over and over.



The obstacles present to Deacon are, as in most zombie survival games, plentiful and unique. Besides the humans Deacon fights, and who serve as the main antagonists, are the “Freakers.” While I was disappointed that most of these Freakers did not pose much of a threat, and could often be taken down in 3 hits or less with some of the more powerful melee weapons, the larger payoff came when the Freakers came after you in hordes. The first time I encountered such a horde was early on in the game where I was ill equipped to handle such a massive number of enemies. In one of the first side objectives I came across, where I had to loot some supplies for my bike and back at the base camp, an enormous group of Freakers began to flood and chase me. While I was able to take down a few chunks of them with my shotgun, there was little I could do to stop the onslaught and I soon found myself overwhelmed and defeated. This sense of doom encouraged me to spend some time away from the main mission narratives to gather the necessary resources to upgrade Deacon and my bike to better prepare me for these hordes, but also to be able to provide me a reliable and speedy escape should I become overwhelmed again.

This small anecdote from my experience with my first zombie horde in Days Gone brings up one of the most important (though poorly explained) features of the game. While Deacon does not have a “side-kick” or traveling partner with them all the time to help tell the story, one of the most important characters that is with Deacon is his bike. After losing his first bike early in the game (which holds a significant sentimental value to him for story related reasons), you are relegated to using a beat up bike that hardly can get you from point A to point B, let alone give you enough of an opportunity to escape overpowering zombie hordes. While there are clear upgrades for the bike available, the pure necessity of it is not ever made clear. While I did spend some time doing some of the side objectives to help me get the necessary material to upgrade my bike, when some of the more exciting story beats came around I tended to neglect my bike upkeep, and the consequences of that could be readily seen. While I did enjoy the fact that Deacon’s bike truly became an extension of himself and an important part of the Days Gone world, I felt the absolute necessity of needing to upgrade the bike so often just to have it be of any use in later story missions was excessive and played into the pacing issues with the missions I discussed earlier. Not much of Days Gone could be considered grinding, but the goal of upgrading your bike certainly fit into that category and began to wear my patience thin before too long.



Perhaps what disappointed me most about Days Gone were the technical hiccups. Things never got so bad to the point that it was a slide show, even during asset heavy moments such as when a zombie horde was on screen, but I experienced pretty consistent frame rate drops. While they weren’t hugely noticeable, it was enough to take me out of the action. Even worse, these frame rate drops were happening on my PS4 Pro while the game was running at a standard 1080p. These drops would have been understandable if it was playing at a 4K resolution, but I found the game to be poorly optimized in this regard, which I found to be a major let down particularly because of how beautifully recreated the Pacific Northwest was in this game. Particularly when riding on your bike requires very specific and intricate movements in order to avoid taking massive amounts of damage, even these small frame rate drops were enough to cause more than a little frustration. I should note, these frame rate issues happened less and less once the latest patch was applied, but it did not eradicate the problem entirely. It remains to be seen if the frame rate can be further stabilized with post launch patches.

Overall, Days Gone is a very good proof of concept for what a massive open world zombie, post apocalyptic game can look like. As a full release game, however, it leaves much to be desired. There is a basis and foundation here that can be built upon, but the repetitive objectives, poor pacing, and agonizingly painful stealth missions turn what could have been another strong Playstation exclusive into a long and dull march towards an unsatisfying finish. I give a lot of credit to the team at Bend Studio for putting a lot of love into making this a truly unique experience, but in doing so, they sacrificed a lot of the small details that could have made the game a lot smoother. If you are looking for a unique take on the zombie survival genre, this will certainly wet that appetite for a few hours of gameplay, but your mileage will vary (especially if you are using Deacon’s bike) on just how much the uniqueness of the game can carry you through some of the duller moments.

**Sony provided us with a code for Days Gone for review.