Days Gone

Ultimately, I will look back on my time with Days Gone fondly. No, it wasn’t on the same level as other PS4 exclusives before it, but as I eluded to in my opening, not all meals have to be gourmet. Bend Studios set out to make a game about a biker in a post-apocalyptic world full of Freakers that aren’t quite human and aren’t quite dead, and it’s generally a fun experience with some clever gameplay choices and a few moments of brilliance.

Day’s Gone provides an entertaining experience that tries harder to make you feel than it does to make you think. The characters and their inner conflicts may not stay with you, but the act of seeing them through their adventures could keep you happily engaged for quite a while.

Days Gone is excellent when you’re riding your bike or stealthily dispatching enemies. The action sequences, however, illustrate very poor enemy AI. Furthermore, all the quests and activities soon become extremely repetitive and bland. The game falls flat just when it should be reaching its climax.

The zombie apocalypse is well-trodden territory and the open-world spin of Days Gone can only differentiate it so much. There's a strong narrative focus, but Deacon St. John doesn't carry that weight as deftly as he could. There are highlights and fun tools available within, but the game doesn't push those forward initially, leaving the players to deal with some tedium first. Days Gone is a great foundation for something better though, so hopefully Bend gets the chance to improve upon it.

Days Gone has a couple of fantastic ideas, including the blockbuster horde battles that offer some of the most heart-pounding zombie spectacles I’ve seen yet. Unfortunately, these fantastic moments are fleeting, with generic missions, a messy story, and a plague of technical bugs holding back Days Gone from becoming a zombie-slaying classic.

Days Gone is a keen and engaging open world zombie adventure despite some issues.

Deacon St. John is a pretty cool dude and we really appreciated the biker setting in a beautiful world filled to the brim with missions and adventure. The story is decent enough and the gameplay feels smooth enough to make sure you'll enjoy your time here. At the same time there are many performance issues like frame drops, occasional stuttering and even the odd crash now and again. The game is rife with bugs and glitches which will detract from the entertainment which is a true shame. Without these issues the game would have turned out much, much better.

Days Gone’s survival horror underbelly gives it just enough identity to set it apart from the dozens of other open worlders already available. A dense selection of overlapping gameplay mechanics make for entertaining action, even if the title’s unremarkable mission design doesn’t always make the best of them. The story can drift, and the overall package isn’t quite as polished as its PS4 exclusive counterparts – but as far as gaming comfort food goes, you could feast on worse snacks than this.

Days Gone is a fine addition to the evergrowing list of first-party Sony exclusives. Does it have the shine and polish comparable to Naughty Dog's best works? No, but it delivers a dense and beautiful open world that proves that there's perhaps a little bit of elbow room left for zombies in gaming, even if we're not calling them that this time around.

Days Gone seems like a classic case of a game that grew too big for its own good. The production values are excellent and it packs some tense gameplay and emotional stories, but the poor pacing, tedious open world, and padded length significantly drag it down overall.

Days Gone is contextually broken, its gunplay is deplorable, its ‘open-world’ premise is a joke and its narrative consistently overrides that open-world ‘design’ goal. It’s pretty, in parts, but it’s broken across the board because it’s disparate in what it wants to be, and that’s because it fails to be Days Gone. Instead it just mimics, brokenly, games already gone.

Days Gone is a fairly typical open world post apocalyptic survival title that offers a few memorable mechanics and story beats, but is eventually consumed by genre clichés. Poor technical performance further hinders its chances of survival, but perhaps with time that wound will heal.

Days Gone feels like a medium quality candy in a very high quality wrap. It’s extremely beautiful and starts off brilliantly, but lacks the ability to maintain the tension and interest over time. With some good combat and lots of content, but a boring story and repetitive gameplay, Days Gone never unlocks its full potential.

While full of good intentions with its impressive hordes of mutants and some remarkable panoramas, it may be that the impression of having already played Days Gone a dozen times in the last 5 years comes to your mind very quickly.

Days Gone has some moments of brilliance, but there're far too may bugs. The hordes improve the game drastically, it's just a shame that a lot of the game suffers in other avenues.

Days Gone feels bloated, like a movie that goes on for an hour longer than it needs to or should’ve. It’s messy and confused, but peppered with genuinely thrilling encounters with rampaging hordes of zombies and occasionally breathless firefights. There’s a good game in here somewhere, but it’s buried in a meandering storyline, repetitive missions, and just too much obligatory stuff to do without an eye on the smaller details that could have given it much more character.

Days Gone is an above average open-world game that is brought down by a weak first act, poor shooting, and a lot of technical issues.

Days Gone has moments where it reveals its brilliance, but they’re buried under a litany of uninteresting and repetitive missions and numerous technical issues.

Days Gone could have been much better if the developers cut it by at least a third, and added more varied missions into the mix.

At the beginning of the game you’ll feel like you've already played this game... then it will let you go for a while only to return with reinforcements (and lots of bugs). However, Days Gone has a couple of pleasant moments, that can't be denied. [Issue#295]

Regardless of how pretty the world of Days Gone is to look at, it’s a game that tried too much and truly suffered from it. The story drags on, the writing for characters is so inconsistent it becomes infuriating, the entire camp system adds more bloat to the game and nothing really feels as good as it should. The main selling point of the game, the hordes, don’t even truly matter until 30 hours into the already lengthy 40-hour game which alone is a huge misstep regardless of how enjoyable they may be when they finally appear. I know there is a solid 10 to 15-hour game within Days Gone, but there is too much unnecessary stuff that has been piled onto it that makes it a forgettable and unenjoyable experience.

Rather than focus on what it does well, Days Gone does everything. Despite some great tech and compelling core ideas, especially when it comes to its battles against massive enemy hordes, a dull and repetitive open world structure makes Days Gone a chore.

Running on a treadmill and Days Gone are very similar experiences. You put in time and effort, yet you remain in the same spot. Thrilling gameplay and crazed “freakers” cannot save this game from its LONG, uncompelling story. Ultimately, the number of hours invested in Days Gone do not pay off. This is not a full throttle Sony exclusive that we’ve come to know and love, it’s miles away from that.

Ultimately, Days Gone is best described as an infuriating-if-enjoyable mess. It offers both a good central tenant of an idea and a unique take on a saturated genre, but is subsequently let down by dated storytelling, unnecessary bloat (the level-up system is so ineffectual you may question why anyone bothered to include it) and an investment in time and patience that really doesn’t come anywhere near to justifying the eventual pay-off.

Days Gone seems to have taken many cues from The Last of Us and Uncharted, but fails to match their standards. Thrilling chance battles with Freakers are punctuated with meandering and dull flashback chats with your wife, bookended with abrupt loading screens, with one mission even forcing us to pick flowers.

Days Gone features some potentially interesting community-building mechanics and the appeal of a bikers vs. zombies game is hard to ignore, but it never lets its best ideas take center stage. Instead, it focuses on lackluster combat and a repetitive set of missions. It moves along on the kind of momentum that exists almost by default in big open world packed with activities, but I could never get fully engaged, partly due to its dragging pace, scattershot story, off-putting protagonist, and frequent bugs.

Days Gone is a derivative but enjoyable action-adventure with a beautiful environment, using AI and physics to create exciting moments of procedural entertainment. But its familiar tale of mankind struggling to re-create society after the end of the world and its romantic through-line are haphazardly structured and under-written, and the characters are too busy calling each other sons of bitches and assholes to say or do anything moving, original or profound. This is a game of fun and fury – it’s thrilling at times, but it signifies nothing.

For sure, Days Gone have a good story and characters that are pleasant to follow. But missions and gameplay are too repetitive, AI is too silly, bugs and freezes too frequent (even on PS4 Pro) to have us considering it as a fully enjoyable game. Too bad.

Days Gone follows every post-apocalypse cue in the book. It does combat, level design, and bike riding well but struggles to overcome a basic story.

This sordid state of affairs leads me to believe that Days Gone was either rushed out by Sony to fill a gap in releases and buy time for the likes of The Last of Us Part 2 or that Bend Studio, a veteran of PSP and PS Vita titles, simply cannot develop for a bona fide console.

There are glimmers of true excellence here; small stretches of Days Gone can be especially fun and polished. However, the assembly of these various parts suffers from the lack of an engaging story, compelling characters, or an open world that feels organic and worth exploring.

Days Gone is an alright first step for Bend Studio. It's a competent open world game with massive, diverse environments for you to explore, even if there aren't actually a lot of interesting things to do. It's also very vanilla, and there just isn't much substance beneath its glossy surface.

A peculiarly constructed open world zombie game that sidelines its most unique features in favour of generic action and unengaging storytelling.

With some tweaks to the pacing, it could have reconciled its warm, frank look at humanity and been something special.

Derivative and beset by astounding technical problems, Days Gone is a rare misfire among Sony’s first-party efforts. While the core fantasy of surviving in a world overrun with infected occasionally shines through, Bend Studio doesn’t deliver nearly enough compelling moments to justify the long slog it takes to see this mediocre story through to its end.

What a shame. Days Gone is ripe with potential, but it's always in those moments before something actually happens: when you hear the rumbling of thunder heralding an impending downpour, or a distant engine letting you know tourble's on the way. But when it all kicks off, the spell is broken. This is "State of Decay" without the stakes, "The Last of Us" without Naughty Dog's storytelling chops, and the most generic, overlong open-world game around. [Issue#333, p.106]

Days Gone has a lot of great ideas, an interesting story and some of the most beautiful eyes in the business, but other than that the game is lacking in both polish and execution. Overall it's completely serviceable, but that's about it.

Days Gone is a game that is, at once, both so close and so far from being what it could have been. There are certainly things here to enjoy and sufficiently pass the time. Those dusty roads of Oregon being the most prominent, but when that world is so empty and its inhabitants so vacant, it starts to become a real challenge to care.

Days Gone may have excellent dialogue and enjoyable cutscenes but it’s obvious that its gameplay didn’t receive that same level of refinement. It fashions itself as a stealth game, but the stealth mechanics are sometimes unpredictable and the melee combat grows stale quickly. Its pivotal moments turn its hero into an action star, but gunplay is underwhelming and lacks any real thrill. Though it places you in a post-apocalyptic setting, the survival mechanics do nothing more than add monotony without ever raising the stakes...Sadly, Days Gone is the first real clunker of a PS4 exclusive.

I did a lot of things in Days Gone. I burned every single Freaker nest; I cleared every ambush camp; I maxed out my bike; I took out a few optional hordes just because. Like Deacon with Sarah, I kept going because I hoped to find something, to follow a thread to a possibly fascinating or satisfying or impactful conclusion. But at the end of it all, I'd only gotten scraps.