Personal review on Days gone (Playstation 4).
Intro
For me personally, it was days flew by, this super lengthy game by Bend studio which was released under the Playstation Exclusive banner by Sony has some serious meat on its bones. And by meat, I mean storylines. A 30-60 hour kind of storyline meal. Which obviously, I like.
I’ve been screaming for cool Single players for years, and obviously, I’m not the only one. With even Playstation themselves claiming that there should be a newfound focus on Single players, which they nailed with games as The last of us, God of war, Horizon zero dawn, to name a few. They gave it another whirl with Days Gone. Developed by Bend Studios whom started -full of hope for their first PS4 triple A title- development in early 2015 & got teased for the first time at E3 in 2016. Due to major setbacks they didn’t make the 2018 release mark. But it’s finally here. 2019.
No multiplayer, no battle royale, no custom apps connected to it. A game where all you need is you, the player, a controller and loads of time. That’s exactly what many have been waiting for, including me, so we can state, that I was pretty hyped for this game when they teased it. But they did pick out a few topics that have already been done a few times, and maybe rightfully so. A 3rd person open world, post-apocalyptic zombie game. Sounds like they picked all the parts that worked for Sony in the last few years and puzzled them together into Days gone. They got a lot of slack for choosing these puzzle-pieces, since it’s “already been done”, but if you realise they already started development in 2015. When the zombie hype was still hot in its tracks. I just feel for them they had so much setbacks and delays, since they have had the right ideas, which maybe led to a (maybe over-) hyped game, because they kept dropping trailers during these delays.
I wanted to go into that for a bit, since it’s something that’s been on my mind since I started playing it. They released the trailers where you saw the main protagonist, Deacon St. John, whom, let’s be honest, didn’t look like the most likable character. He looked like a buff bikerboy without any emotions at all. And it felt very “Gears of warsy”” to me. Which is not a good thing in my book, it looked like they had some nice ideas, but didn’t know how to deliver that Sony Exclusive triple A title experience. That kind of scared me, and with the stuff they kept releasing, it didn’t look like it was progressing in the right direction.
Then the day of embargos came. All the reviews came in, and let’s be honest, it didn’t look good. With so much negativity, I’m always keen on making my own review, which is why I’m jotting this down, I want to give a non-paid honest review about my personal experience off the game.
Story
With not much to lose I started up the game, I kinda liked the intro, but still wasn’t convinced yet about the setting & the main characters. Then things like this started happening in the first 10 minutes of the game. https://www.twitch.tv/jnoxx/clip/FilthyWealthyRadishNotLikeThis (Clip of my Twitch channel). And let me frank, this is not the only time this happened in the game, I had it loads of times, that cars randomly spawned and killed me, or suddenly popped in front of me and yeeted me off my bike. But I kept progressing and I kinda got in to the story, it actually seemed that… Deacon had feelings? Like, actual emotions? Which surprised me in a good way. But basically the story starts there, you lose track of your wife when you send her off in a hectic helicopter to be rescued after she’s stabbed. The camp she was getting nurtured at got overrun by zombies (called Freakers in this game), So you’re convinced she died with them. With constant flashbacks you learn more about the relationship between Deacon & his wife Sarah. And how their relation hitted off, how they grew towards each other, and I really felt I was bonding with them. Which for me, is a good sign for a game. I like the flashbacks, the endless cutscenes and learning more about these two. The emotion you feel when you visit her grave he made for her, to mourn her, when he talks to “her”. It hit the right notes for me. And when it appears there is a small chance his wife is still alive, is when the story really kicks in.
Basically, your adventure is simple, you drive through a quite large open world, there are multiple kind of enemies, natural predators like wolves, bears, cougars. There is another group called the Rippers which are this religious cult who believe anyone who’s a non believer should die, so they’ll try to kill you constantly along the way. There are also “Marauders”, which are also survivors of the outbreak, and are very hostile to anyone who doesn’t belong to them, so they’ll set up ambushes to catch you off guard, which I really liked (but gets a tad repetitive, but more on that later). Then there are the Freakers, spread around the open world, they exist in different forms, but I won’t spoil too much on that. Depending on the dynamic weather system or the current time in the game defines how much there are out there and how aggressive they are. Sometimes they group up and they’re called hordes or swarms. The trailers made it look like the focus of the game was killing hordes, but they’re actually quite a small part of the game. But more on that later too. The flow of the game is also quite simple, you’re an outlaw, called a Drifter, you’re a biker and with your best friend Boozer you roam the open world, and help different encampments with different missions. These missions can be anything like bounty hunts, clearing enemy camps, rescuing someone, discovering new areas. These missions give you credits which are bound to that specific encampment, which allow you to buy upgrades for your bike, refuel your bike, buy medkits and ammo, and you needs loads of that. Loads of it… The shooting in the game is quite satisfying though, I was also hooked on having my silencers on, all the time. There is a slow motion in the game, which is called focus. Which you can trigger for a couple of seconds until it regenerates. Which makes it easier to take long distance sniper shots (preferably with a sniper), since I’m not a hero in aiming with a controller. The headshotting is satisfying, killing enemies is satisfying, that all feels good. Whacking the hell out of an enemy with your own crafted weapon and killing them with 1 hit just feels so good. Molotoving enemy nests and watch them burn made me feel like a pyromaniac who watches the house burn down. In the beginning you lack ammo ALL the time, since you didn’t upgrade anything yet. So I’d advise to use it wisely, and use your boot knife as much as you can. Driving your bike can be fun, but it also feels like it’s a constant struggle with yourself. You feel like you think you know what you’re doing, but sometimes it does the total opposite and you ruin your bike and have to find scrap to repair it again. Which can be quite frustrating at times.
While grinding away the missions, which is something that is brought up a lot in the current reviews that they’re a bit repetitive. Which I can’t disagree on, but on the other hand, which open world has such a wide variety of missions. I actually thought there was a decent balance and I enjoyed doing them. On the other hand, I am an MMORPG player, so I’m kind of used doing the same thing over and over. Or at least something similar, but I live streamed the whole game, and it’s not something that has been brought up a lot. I think I maybe picked the quests how I wanted to play, sometimes I did a bounty hunt, sometimes I went to destroy some Freaker nests, I just tried to balance it myself quite a bit. But when you’re not out there doing these missions, you can focus on the main story, which like I wrote here before, is actually quite fun, I wanted to keep doing missions to develop the story & learn more about what’s about to happen in the future in the game, what happened before, what is currently happening elsewhere, I found it a good balance in the game. And a very good (which was slow) pace of the story development. I felt like I was constantly hungry to advance the main story.
The bad news
Like mentioned before, the game is long, so it did cost me a lot of sleep to get it all done, I finished all side quests too. I really wanted to get there in the end, and i was really glad when I did. But here comes the bad news. And stay tuned, it’s quite a lot. I’ve shown the clip before in this blog of what happened in the first 10 minutes of the game, can you imagine what happened during the game?
The open world is kind of divided in 2 parts. And in the current patch (I finished on 1.0.5), the game feels like they’ve only added the second part in the end of development cycle, maybe to increase the size of the game, and didn’t have time to test it at all. I have had framedrops nearly every 30 seconds in the second part. It was so unstable, it was barely playable to me. A small example here: https://www.twitch.tv/jnoxx/clip/DeafAbrasiveLatteNomNom It looks worse on my screen than it looked like on stream. This happened A LOT in the open world, also, textures not loading, cutscenes where textures where not loading, area’s where I fell through the ground: https://www.twitch.tv/jnoxx/clip/TrustworthyObedientStarAsianGlow Lot’s of weird things like ghosting, (I have a lot of clips about weird ghosting). https://www.twitch.tv/jnoxx/clip/ArtisticObeseCamelAllenHuhu (look at the hand) Some weird AI which happened more often than I wanted. https://www.twitch.tv/jnoxx/clip/CuriousObeseKumquatHassaanChop When some items didn’t load, and NPC’s spawned T-shaped. https://www.twitch.tv/jnoxx/clip/GloriousBlueStingrayNomNom
And I can keep going. This is just a few issues I’ve encountered. There are also missions that didn’t want to progress. For example, when I countered my first real big horde, which took me quite a bit to actually finish. I FINALLY finished it, but then the quest wouldn’t progress, because it said there was a zombie left, but I tried anything to find it, set off alarms, throw bombs etc. But nothing, after half an hour I resetted my checkpoint and it went through immediately. Very frustrating bits and bobs which kind of ruined the game for me. Some other weird quirks which I encountered are in some conversations. Sometimes you were just rolling with someone on the bike, a cutscene started and he just started shouting at the other person, like they were in a fight. But nothing happened leading up to it. It sometimes just felt that there were several “trees” of conversations, and they were cutting here and there to get the to the final version. But sometimes, it just didn’t line up at all. Very weird corner cutting sort of speak. Other issues I’ve encountered are endless, my binoculars, which you can use to tag enemies only worked 10% of the game, my zoomed in sniper HUD didn’t load 20-30% of the time. My normal zoom was also broken quite often. Repairing your bike often didn’t work for me. There is just too much to list to be honest.
The verdict
Even though I’ve had so much issues, it didn’t ruin the total experience for me, I just cared too much about the story and finishing the quest lines. But it feels like they released 3-4 months too early. And I feel for them, since it costed them quite the reputation. But I really think they will ace their next game if they get another chance. And maybe there will be another one… If at least, you finished the game and you know what I’m talking about. Marvel-esque post-credits that is. So please, give this game a shot, and let me know what you think. Solid 7.5 for me personally. If they fix their stuff, I’d give it a 8 or 8.5.
jNoxx.