Review copy provided by PlayStation.
Days Gone has a unique take on the zombie apocalypse, which is rare for such a bloated, festering genre.
Instead of trying to escape the concrete jungle, you’re settled into the mountains of Oregon,
free to navigate roads, trails, and forests on a custom motorcycle.
The campaign is lengthy, the map is enormous,
and with mutated beasts and swarms of freakers that can wipe you out in seconds,
the world feels very dangerous.
If it weren’t for a range of technical issues and strange design decisions,
Days Gone could have stood shoulder to shoulder with the best PlayStation exclusives.
You ride around in the boots of Deacon St. John, a very capable drifter.
He’s often sent out by local camps to pick up supplies, rescue friends, or hunt down enemies.
After losing his wife in society’s collapse over two years ago,
Deacon only trusts himself and his gang brother, Boozer.
He’s a surprisingly sour protagonist, always accepting missions with a sneer and a shrug.
He makes some pretty obvious mistakes, and his attitude can get exhausting, especially
when his reactions feel more volatile than they should be.
However, Deacon also has to deal with quite a lot compared to your average survivor.
Each camp he does favors for has its own leadership and moral code,
and the story spends more time exploring the cruelty of mankind
than the brutality of the monstrous freakers.
Even though much of the campaign is optional, it goes on a bit longer than it should.
Picking up bounties and clearing hideouts for a handful of camps can get repetitive,
and compared to the elaborate cutscenes in the more important missions,
the stiff interactions when accepting contracts feel awkward and fake.
Yet whenever the story starts to drag,
it soon reaches surprising or emotionally powerful moments
delivered by a diverse and dedicated cast.
The story is oddly paced, but has a lot of heart.
By the time Deacon reaches the end of this journey, it feels like he’s come a long way.
That’s partly because of how much driving he does.
The bike is a smart survival tool, and many of the people you meet have hogs of their own.
It feels good to ride across the state, hopping over ramps and narrowly dodging rampaging hordes.
It’s enjoyable to start taking shortcuts when you cross the same path a second and third time,
but the act of driving everywhere does become a bit dull by the end of the campaign.
The map is designed to open up new roads as the story moves forward, but
you also revisit busier spots multiple times.
Resource management should always be on your mind.
Can you make one more leg of the trip or should you turn around and take the time to resupply back at camp?
You can fast-travel to certain locations, but it always consumes fuel,
so you can only travel as far as your tank can take you.
It pays to stop by stations along your route to fill up
or to try to spot red gas canisters
while you’re at a rest stop or enemy camp.
The size of your gas tank is one of many things you can improve on your bike.
You can personalize your ride’s color, change decals,
and unlock custom patterns when you finish certain storylines.
You can get a new headlight or install nitrous that helps you escape hordes
or blast over roadside jumps.
Your bike takes damage from crashes and gunfire, and you can get it serviced back at camp or
repair it on the road with collected scrap.
You can retrieve your bike at a mechanic, but it’s always nice to remember where you parked since
your bike stores extra ammo and you need to be near it to fast-travel.
It’s easy to build a sense of attachment to the vehicle,
and the various performance upgrades definitely make a difference in how things feel beneath the tires.
Each camp gives Deacon a line of credit to purchase all this,
and you pay into it by doing missions or selling freaker parts,
food, or plants you collect while traveling.
Doing favors for camps also increases their trust,
eventually unlocking new weapons and bike parts.
Some camps specialize in one or the other, so you might want to save your trophies to sell at a camp
that has the upgrade you want.
You might help a stranger by the roadside who needs somewhere to go,
and sending them to one camp over another has its benefits.
Scanning the environment also reveals a range of materials
needed to craft traps, distractions, and throwable weapons.
Discovering areas is exciting at first, but in the longer chapters,
managing your gas level and scrounging around for components starts to feel like a chore.
A special vision mode highlights important objects around you, but
lots of different things are marked by the same icon, from doorknobs to beer bottles.
Also, despite the various creative tools at your disposal,
including hand-crafted melee weapons,
most threats can be eliminated with just a primary, secondary, and special weapon.
Thankfully some points of interest feel like puzzles.
You have to disable loudspeakers before entering mobile laboratories, otherwise
the sound will attract freakers from all directions.
Meanwhile, some enemy camps have hidden bunkers with detailed maps
that highlight nearby landmarks.
Stealth is a frugal strategy as it saves ammo, and it feels good to sweep through a camp without being spotted.
Tripwires have to be disabled or avoided,
and bear traps can be moved and reused.
You might be able to slip by unnoticed as opposing factions fire on one another,
or you can consider luring in a nearby swarm to clear out enemies for you.
You have to be perceptive when driving as well, beyond just avoiding trees and cars.
Question-marks alert you to spontaneous activities,
wolves and freakers will try to knock you clear off your bike, and ambushing gangs can run you off the road.
You’re always working to become more self-sufficient.
As you move on to bigger camps, better weapons become available.
When you level up, you can spend a point on a melee, ranged, or survival skill.
Special injections increase health, stamina, or a focus bar used to aim in slow motion,
and you can consume special cocktails for temporary boosts.
While helpful, these boosts aren’t really necessary to get by, and many of the skills
aren’t particularly enticing either.
It’s the advanced weapons that make the biggest difference as you encounter new threats.
Eventually you’ll have enough firepower to take on a horde,
a cluster of a hundred or so freakers and by far, the game’s scariest challenge.
There are lots of ways to decrease their numbers like pulling them closer together
and showering them in napalm,
or steering them down narrow passageways to concentrate your fire.
Sometimes you can use the environment to blow them up or slow them down.
In a saturated zombie-games market, hordes are a refreshingly thrilling experience.
It’s terrifying to see the full force of one barreling toward you,
and they’ll spread out, flanking exit routes and leaping over obstacles.
It can be time-consuming to collect materials needed to build weapons
that are most effective against hordes, but facing them definitely elevates the heart rate.
Visually, Days Gone has plenty to show off,
and the rural setting is full of pleasant stretches of road and cliffside views.
Even though you spend all your time in the mountains, each camp has its own personality,
and specific locations change over time.
You definitely feel the danger of the encroaching wilderness as you navigate new areas,
and the campaign’s road map covers a lot of ground.
It’s satisfying to clear out nest after nest of pesky beasts or
to stop ambushers from patrolling your routes, but
the map ultimately doesn’t have enough diversity to warrant how much traveling you have to do.
We rarely faced issues that broke the world or halted progress,
but Days Gone is still full of distracting problems.
The framerate is very inconsistent, even on PlayStation 4 Pro,
sometimes chugging through drastic bouts of slowdown as you turn corners or enter settlements.
Things remain mostly stable when mobs of freakers are on screen, but
the performance suffers off and on when you’re riding around.
We had one freaker get stuck in a cave wall,
one horde almost disappeared beneath a wooden bridge, and a different horde
suddenly spawned right next to us.
The movement patterns of NPCs can also get tripped up,
and when enemies get aggressive, they often make stupid mistakes.
Beneath these roadblocks, there are lots of holes and hiccups in how the world is built.
Characters often call you two or three times with the same information.
Merchants talk way too much in camp, saying hello multiple times in one minute,
and quickly repeating their handful of lines.
Deacon reacts to things that aren’t there,
such as commenting on freaker nests that have already been cleared out.
One time a camp leader called us on the radio just as we began talking to a different camp leader,
and the second person stared at us for two minutes until we finished the conversation.
Another character called while we were near them at camp,
where we could see them doing something other than talking to us on the radio.
These oddities make it hard to stay engaged,
despite the many twists the story throws your way.
Days Gone is incredibly moving, but occasionally frustrating.
Just when you start to get burnt out on resource collection and uniform side-missions,
the story suddenly hooks you back in.
Despite Deacon’s impatience and short temper, his story is often compelling.
His actions have consequences,
and the map evolves as you make positive and negative changes.
Unfortunately, it can also be buggy and less than believable,
which is heart-breaking considering the care given to this world and its characters.
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Review copy provided by PlayStation.