Release Date: 26/04/2019
Played On: PS4
Available On: PS4 / Win
Time Played: 49h 46m
Progress: Completed
Developer: Bend Studios
Publisher: Sony Interactive Entertainment
As recently as about a year ago, if anyone had asked me whether I liked zombie games or not, I would have replied with an emphatic "hell no" and left it at that. I've never been big on horror in any form of media, but especially in games, as I find the interactive nature of the experience a little too visceral. That and I never understood how anyone can find it entertaining to be scared and stressed when they could be doing literally anything else.
Let me just say that I understand how we are all different when it comes to the enjoyment and tolerance of horror games and media in general. I get that what creeps me out would seem quite mild to other gamers, but I can't help it if my imagination runs wild with this stuff and I often end up psyching myself out more than the game ever did in the first place. I really had to push myself to play all the way through Until Dawn, and even then I had already watched a full playthrough on YouTube, so I knew what to expect from start to finish.
Meanwhile, I don't think a lot of zombie focused games are in the class of horror that many other terrifying titles occupy. In fact, if there was a sub-genre of horror games that I found the most approachable, zombie type games would probably take the mantle. After all, the Walking Dead games are all about zombies and I managed to get through them okay, even though I know there will be some horror fans out there wondering how anyone could possibly find those games scary at all. Well, I'm here to tell you that I can, but I still managed to push my way past the minimal scares and have a good time either way.
I once tried to play Amnesia: The Dark Descent, where I didn't even make it to the part with the enemy dude hunting you, as I freaked out and stopped playing long before anything actually scary came along. Just goes to show that even a tense and foreboding atmosphere is enough to give me the willies and make the whole experience unenjoyable. On the other hand, I've recently been playing through The Last Of Us: Remastered, which kind of has some zombie types to worry about, but that game has done nothing other than bore me and I'm about half way through.
Lately I've also been playing some other random games in what is traditionally the horror world like Dead By Daylight and Dead Island. Both of which benefit greatly from the fact that I'm playing them with a friend, so it's hard to get genuinely frightened in the middle of friendly banter and jovial conversation. There are others as well, like Little Nightmares 1 and 2, which may not seem all that frightening, but there were definitely some moments in each that really made my spine chill.
All of this is to try and explain where I'm at with "scary" games, and how even though I don't really play many of the truly horrific games out there, I've actually been dipping my toe into the shallow end a little more in recent times. This is why I ended up playing Days Gone, even though my initial impression of the game was that I'd avoid it thanks to there being swarms of zombies to run away from and be chased by. The trailer and gameplay demo I saw via E3 was enough to show me that I wasn't all that keen on sneaking around in the dark wilderness while hordes of zombies tried to hunt me down. That kind of thing even makes my spine tingle as I write about it and recall the footage that turned me off.
It was only after a couple of friends mentioned that I might enjoy Days Gone, that I even gave it a second thought. However, it turns out that my friends know me well enough to realise that everything other than the zombie element was right up my alley. It's no secret that I love a nice open world game with a focus on story-telling and exploration, so after looking into it some more, I finally decided to have a crack and see what all the fuss was about.
Now, I'm not about to pretend like everything was rainbows and sunshine for me during this game, as there were definitely more than a few scenarios where I got scared and stopped playing for a while. Despite growing more and more used to the in-game zombies the more I played, I still had to save some particular sections for those times when I could tackle them in the middle of day when the sun was shining and everything seemed a bit less frightening. It actually helped me overcome the anxiety I start feeling when I'm in a scary situation, although I still avoided a few areas in-game that were optional and a bit too dark and ominous.
If you've seen anything about Days Gone, it probably had something to do with the hordes of zombies that can be on screen at any given time. There can be hundreds of the undead buggers chasing you, which is actually quite intimidating, as well as being an impressive technical achievement to render so many individual entities at the same time. Thankfully though, this is only one part of the overall game, and not even a large part in the end. Without spoiling anything, I was pleased to discover that the zombie hordes ended up being fairly rare occurrences that could easily be avoided throughout most of the game.
It turns out that each horde is tied to a particular location where they will sleep during the day, or roam around at night. For example, there are a number of hordes that live in caves and old mines around the map. During the day they will be huddled in a single room, leaving the rest of the location free to be explored and looted, so long as you manage to keep quiet and not alert them to your presence. At night the horde will wake up and go for a walk around the area, usually leaving their daytime sanctuary and following a nearby circuit through the world. Once you figure out where to expect a horde and how to avoid them, staying safe manages to be quite easy to do.
There are zombies all over the map, but the hordes are the only ones that really pose any threat to us as we cruise around on our motorcycle. A few dead dudes on their own can easily be taken out with melee attacks, or even firing off some rounds can be a fun way to get all the zombies within ear-shot to charge you down, making for a nice line of bad guys ready for the slaughter. It didn't take long for me to lose any fear I had of the regular zombies roaming the landscape, as it was just as easy to ignore them as it was to kill every individual I encountered.
Hordes were a different story altogether though, as they often required some planning and preparation to defeat. There are a few missions in the game where you can't avoid fighting a horde, so it's worth figuring out the best way to deal with them. Thankfully we have a fairly diverse arsenal of weaponry to draw on, including Molotov cocktails and other explosives that do a good job of punching holes in swarms of mad zombies. I soon found that if I took the time to craft enough bombs and appropriate ammunition, dealing with the hordes became significantly easier. In fact, in some cases the horde turned out to be a trivial nuisance, as I was able to just kite them around an area while tossing Molotovs into the crowd until they had thinned out enough to no longer be much of a threat.
Then again, some of the larger hordes in less open locations really put up a challenge that required extensive recon and planning in order to always keep the upper hand. One particularly large horde took me a number of attempts to defeat, but I spent most of my attempts trying to find an effective path around their location where I would be able to kite them and not get held up by obstacles and general terrain. It took a bit of effort to execute a precise plan, but when I finally pulled it off I really felt like I had overcome and actual challenge.
Despite all of this though, the zombies and their hordes only took up about a third of the entirety of Days Gone, which ended up being a lot more story-heavy than I had been expecting. We get to play as white-American-biker-guy who is hanging out and surviving with his best mate, fellow biker-dude. Honestly, for most of the game the characters were pretty forgettable and while I did enjoy their story overall, I didn't ever get invested or attached. Anyway, thanks to some flashbacks and a few quests that make it painfully obvious, we soon discover that when the zombie outbreak went down, we lost touch with our white-blonde-fiancé-lady-friend when we shoved her on a medical helicopter to be evacuated. Turns out that since that moment, the two biker bros have been doing their best to survive and make a life for themselves in the wilderness.
Of course, one thing leads to another and we end up having to do some jobs for other camps where survivors are staying, as well as exploring for supplies and fighting enemy humans. It's not enough that there are zombies everywhere, but like a lot of post-zombie-outbreak stories, there are humans that want to take over everything and kill the other humans, and then there are the mental cases who go completely mad and turn out to be savages. Running into either of these groups in the open world means that you're in for a fight, but it also means there's some good loot around to be claimed once everyone is dead.
Most of the time, these enemy camps of well-armed douche bags and psychotic barbarians are much more difficult to overcome than the regular zombies in the world. However, the combat loop usually ended up being as straight forward as staying in cover and picking off bad dudes as they popped their heads up over their own waist-high walls. Other than some cool scripted sequences during missions, most of the camps of bad guys turned into a fairly repetitive system of killing everyone, finding their stash, then taking all their loot and claiming the camp as our own. It's very similar to Far Cry's enemy camp system, but thankfully I actually quite like slowly taking over all the locations on the map, so I was cool with it being in this game as well.
Back to the story, and without spoiling anything, our bike bros eventually find themselves having to make some hard decisions after discovering information about the outbreak and the state of the world around them. We then embark on a journey across the map to catch up with our past and hopefully do something about the future. Along the way there are a bunch of side activities and missions to distract us, as there are a number of camps that all want to be helped before they offer any in return, so we quickly become everyone's dog-body and run all sorts of errands.
It's worth noting that some of the side missions on offer in Days Gone, end up being the best parts of the entire story. There are a few quest lines in particular that I can remember for being so compelling and interesting, while there are big chunks of the main story that I forgot as soon as I played them thanks to some questionable writing. In fact, there was more than a few moments in the main story where I found myself actively frustrated at how the characters were all acting with each other. There's plenty of weird dissonant decisions made about the plot that may or may not shit you to tears, but for a long time in the middle of the story I was not enjoying myself and hoping like all hell that it would be saved in the final act.
Although, I'm not sure it ever did get saved, but in the end I wasn't quite as annoyed as I had been in the middle, which means something must have happened to tie it all up nicely. I mean, it's pretty much a standard zombie-survival story, but some of the main plot points and characters weren't written very well and were ultimately a bit disappointing that they hadn't been given the attention they deserved. It put a dampener on the whole narrative aspect of the game, which was a large part of the experience, and a dampener on the whole game.
Then again, in between the zombie hordes and the inconsistent narrative, there's a whole lot of time spent riding around the world on your motorbike, killing bad dudes and looting stuff. I have to admit that this part of the game was by far my favourite, as it really captured a vibe that I immediately found enjoyable and enticing.
I love exploring large open worlds in general, so long as getting around is fun and easy to do, and Days Gone has made it a lot of fun to bike about the wilderness and discover each and every corner of the map. I'm the kind of player that never uses fast-travel in open world games, or at least not until I get bored and want to get the story moving without worrying about travel time. However, while I'm still enjoying the world, there's no better way to really be immersed than by moving through every inch of it in the same way you character actually would if it were a real place.
Thankfully, our motorcycle ends up being a great way to get around, as it's easy to manoeuvre and agile enough to handle both offroad rambling and highway belting. What's more, wielding a shotgun and blasting zombies and bad dudes as you ride on by feels really good, and adds to the overall sense of freedom. Needless to say that it didn't take long for me to grow a little attached to my bike, as it saved my ass on a number of occasions where I needed to get away from a zombie horde or a group of bad dudes nice and quick. Something about feeling like you can ride anywhere and get away from anything, really drew me into the game's world in a way that driving random cars or simply running around would never have been able to do.
Plus, there are some well-balanced game mechanics at play that tie you even closer to your bike, without getting annoying or too bothersome. To be honest, when I discovered that I had limited fuel in the tank and had to scavenge more from the world to keep my bike running, my heart sank a little. I hate annoying survival systems and mechanics, so having to refuel my tank all the time felt like it could have been more of an annoyance than anything enjoyable, but somehow they managed to get it right.
Instead of being frustrating, I found fuel easy to find and manage, along with the bike itself which constantly needs repairing with scrap after every bump and every crash. However, the balance that has been reached for bike maintenance in Days Gone ended up right in that sweet spot where it was frequent enough that I had to pay attention to my precious lifeline of a motorcycle, but it never got so annoying that I felt like all I was ever doing was fixing the damn thing.
I ended up actually giving a shit about what upgrades I was applying to my bike, and whether I had enough fuel and scrap on me to keep it running. Most of the time it didn't need more than a second thought, but there were some longer missions where refuelling and scavenging for supplies became a must. Thankfully, the world has been designed in such a way that you're never completely boned if you run out of resources, but you might have to go for a bit of a walk through zombie-town if you want to grab a fresh can of fuel.
Thus, Days Gone ended up being more of an enjoyable motorcycle exploration game for me than an intense zombie-outbreak drama. The story has some interesting angles here and there, but is ultimately generic and something of a letdown, while also being straight up frustrating every now and then. Like I said earlier, there are some genuinely interesting and fun side mission stories to follow that are more memorable than the main questline, so at least there's something fun to do along the way.
The zombie hordes are certainly impressive and a technical achievement, even if they do get a bit repetitive after a while and I didn't feel all that compelled to scour the map and take them all down. At the end of the day I just wanted to ride around the world on my motorcycle and see the whole plot through, which I was able to do while having a decent enough time doing it. A small part of me wishes that the scary zombie angle was completely removed from the game, but I guess a lot of games like that kind of thing so fair enough. It's just a shame that the most hyped aspect of Days Gone (the zombie hordes) ended up being one of the least compelling and interesting parts of the game.
I feel like I keep getting confused by saying one part was good, then another was bad, but that kind of sums up my time with Days Gone accurately. In hindsight I feel like I had a good time with the game, but it wasn't anything to write home about, and even got super annoying here and there. Although, I'm a sucker for a nice open world and for cruising around that world in an enjoyable way, and that's where Days Gone really managed to hook me in and stand out.
Maybe it's not a hot recommendation to say that cruising around the world on my bike was the best part, but that's the honest truth and there's no two ways about it. Aside from a few interesting moments, the overall story and gameplay of Days Gone ended up being a bit of a middling experience that neither thrilled me or left me wanting much more. I'm glad I played it, but if they announced a sequel I wouldn't be rushing out to pre-order it on day one. I'd probably wait for a couple of years and pick it up in a sale.