Days Gone Review

When first we heard of it, Days Gone was little more than another Playstation exclusive game with a lot of zombies in it. Which in that way made it a strange companion piece to the already existing 'The Last of Us' which was widely considered an absolute masterpiece. Sure, Days Gone impressed with the unique-looking rat-like scrambling horde animations which made their 'Freaks' look like they came out of a scene from World War Z- but there was no way this would hit the same emotional sticking points that the deeply narrative-driven story of Joel and Ellie did. Which was probably why Days Gone got the shade that it did so early on. As it would transpire, Days Gone would launch to strong sales but a mixed critical reception, the latter of which would seemingly go on to doom the budding franchise to never be realised. (Despite what one of the game director's would later insist when it came to 'sales' and 'buying games at full price'.)

Over the years I've heard it mentioned time and time again that the real 'problem' with Days Gone was just that it wasn't quite to the same level of quality as your typical first party Sony game, which was why it wasn't worth the support. John Garvin inspired such discourse with his own comments about what killed the game, namely the technical problems at launch, (A smattering of which still persist to this day on the PC version, I can attest. Although not enough to be experience killing.) the fact that it's reviewers apparently 'couldn't be bothered to play the game' (A point I have some thoughts about later) and finally, iconicly, "it had woke reviewers who couldn't handle a gruff white biker looking at his date's ass." Now John Garvin seems to have always been something of an ass from what I read about him, and clearly has a tendency to let his passions overwhelm him to the point where his rectal refuse spews out of his soup hole- however: I will say that after actually playing Days Gone- I finally understand this tweet storm.

Not that I think the points he was making were sound. Apart from the technical difficulties which were apparent in reviews, everything else is the exact type of seething cope you expect from Twitter chuds- not a video game director. However, I can understand why the failure of Days Gone would get the man passionate enough to dribble diarrhea in place of sensible words. Because you see, Days Gone is not a middle of the road game like it's review aggregates place it. It's actually a good game. I'd go so far as to call it 'very good' in parts. What I think Days Gone suffers from is merely being a game of a similar genre and emotional tone to The Last of Us, an actual masterpiece. The comparison, unfavourable as it is, stamps down the actual quality elements that make Days Gone, a mechanically distinct entity, shine. And that is what I want to talk about in this here review. 

Days Gone is a zombie game, as I have mentioned, however it places itself in rare company as being one of only two zombie games that I know of (excluding VNs that I've read.) which push a serious-toned character driven narrative over an action driven one. Name any zombie game under the sun, Dead Rising, Dead Island, Dying Light- all of those games- and you'll find these action-driven narratives that excel in the exploration of the zombie slaying fantasy. Each one of these games, at their heart, ask the question- how can we use our position as a video game to provide wacky and creative zombie kills or unique zombie-player interactions. Those games are built around the inherently game-friendly concept of zombie slaying. Days Gone and The Last of Us- use the zombie apocalypse concept in it's more narrative-friendly sense- to mirror the animalistic cruelty of a world that has lost the framework of society to contain it. And that is not easy to do.

Somewhat similar to my feelings when first playing Death Stranding- Days Gone was not a game I understood right away. In it's early few missions, thrown into the woody trails of rural Oregon, I honestly struggled to find a thread worth following. Not expecting a character-driven narrative, for how rare they are in video games, I genuinely felt like we were spinning wheels going nowhere and was fully ready to check out emotionally from the game. Afterall, the world of the game is intentionally grim and brown- populated in the early game by just a couple of outposts manned with decidedly grounded and human personalities. The 'Freaks' (their word for 'Zombie') looked uninspired and lacked the crazy variations that Left for Dead envisioned and everyone else copied. By all rights Days Gone should have bored me to tears right out of the gate. But it didn't.

Sam Witwer is an actor I always kind of liked for his work in Star Wars, as Starkiller and Darth Maul, he always stood out well enough. And it helped that Star Killer was literally modelled after his face so unlike most actors, I knew the man's face well enough to recognise him in other properties. What he brings to Deacon St John, the protagonist of Days Gone, is nothing short of extraordinary in how it alone keeps this world together. What should be the most boring zombie setting of all time is given flavour for the lens of playing as Deacon St John, a impressively human survivor, selfish and irreverent and yet endearing and charismatic. Of course his writing deserves considerable praise too, (Garvin was a writer, I see, so I guess I can give him some credit this direction.) but Sam works his butt off bringing humanity into every single interaction as Deacon, making the character endlessly watchable. If this game starred Kyle Crane or even Frank West- it wouldn't have worked. Deacon was everything he needed to be to sell Days Gone, and wearing Sam Witwer's face he made me stick around until the credits.

Days Gone frames it's gameplay loop around navigating the open world on bike-back, scavenging for supplies and crafting components and keeping your bike fuelled up where possible. Deacon's Bike has to be one of the least fuel-effective vehicles to ever run, because that baby runs out every ten minutes or so. (The game even tells you to glide down slopes when possible to conserve ammo! Has the tank got a permanent bullet hole in it or something?) Now as much as it sounds it, the Bike doesn't actually play a huge role outside of traversal and being a point from which you save (making it practically your lifeline) because it, somewhat realistically, breaks down pretty easily if you try to plough over enemies and the fact that Freaks can launch themselves at you in order to knock you off the thing. Honestly, there's so many traps and foils specifically made for getting you off the Bike so that you can't run away, sometimes it feels like the developers don't want you riding around on the thing!

Freaks break the conventions of your Dead Rising type zombies, in that they keep a decent pace (not quite sprinting) and actually react to sound appropriately, creating those fun moments of dynamic decision making between risking taking a shot and spending half the durability of your disposal bat you've lugged about all this time. The freaks of Days Gone aren't actually given a great many variants like you might find in other zombie titles but the few they have seem grounded enough to not make the world seem too cartoonish. No giant bulbous bloaters who explode in puffs of bile, or giant mutant tank monsters- but you do get your average Swarmers who like to rush you straight, and your tiny Newts who stick to rooftops and only attack if you invade their territory or hobble about looking like easy prey with only a slither of health. As the game progresses the variants get a bit more interesting but nothing really iconic or memorable ever turns up. Even the big 'scary' late game Freak is just a bit obnoxiously fast.

Where the freaks really come to life is in those giant hordes that were shown off in the E3 demo. These are truly intimidating tidal waves of corpses that surge after you in unison, pouring in from every doorway and window in one swarm. The adrenaline really starts to pile up when you realise there is no trick here, these hoards can only be retreated from and whittled down piece by piece in giant slogs of close calls, panic decisions and mad sprints. The climbing ability of the Freaks means there's nowhere you can go that they can't follow and the more realistically muted 'burst' of explosives means that you're probably going to burn through everything you have everytime you wake a group up. To say nothing of the accidental hordes you summon. (I may never forget the horror of the army that turned out to be snoozing just above in that cave I was clearing out.)

But as with any Zombie story, the humans are actually the driving force of the game and this may be one of the only zombie games ever not to recycle zombie NPC code for their human enemies! The enemy AI isn't entirely braindead for once! And with the semi-decent 3rd person shooting mechanics and the scrappy melee combat, these little shootouts feel a lot more satisfying then fighting humans in a zombie game really should. I actually enjoyed hunting down bandit camps for the brief thrill of those tense snappy cover-based fire-fights wherein, once they have a track of you, the AI starts flanking and surrounding you- forcing the player to get creative. Double points for the 'line of sight' stealth system allowing you to slip away in the middle of a fight and disappear, leading the AI into a trap of your own! And yet, I will admit that early game fire fights felt better because of the scarceness of resources. Once you get practically unlimited ammo after a few hours of playing, the lustre slightly fades. (Why bother hastily switching weapons in a panicked scramble when I can just roll up to a locker and magically refill my assault rifle super easily?)

As a 'drifter', Deacon's connection to the world around him is transitory as the Biker simply wants to move forwards and onwards in his attempt to get over the mourning he has been trapped within over the past two years since losing his wife. Those characteristics frame who he is and the circle he keeps, with his selfishness and mercenary sensibilities coloured under the knowledge that in his mind, Deacon simply wants to escape the valley his wife died in. That humanising element is really the key to making any character like this work, and it's what makes him so much more endearing than your typically motor-mouthed asshole protagonist who's just in a bad mood until the story decides it's time for him to be the hero for a change. Deacon's entire journey is spent around the development of who he is, the connections he ends up making despite himself and how his priorities change- one might call into question some of the narrative choices taken in the second half of this game slightly undermining the sacrificial nature of that development- but in complete execution I actually think his story is handled exceptionally.

One of the most interesting aspects of any 'end of the world' story is picking out the types of people who would survive through a mass extinction event, and Days Gone's common-sense approach to it's world building brings you a sensible co-cast of believable assholes. The annoying prepper-conspiracy-hat Copeland- a character easy to make archetypal but played with some reserve here, so as to better resemble that cast of the deeply mistrusting misanthrope who, although many of his emotional viewpoints align with Deacon, his incessant politics are irksome. Our Tucker, the jack-booted wardeness with her empathy-free approach to running a post world camp making the woman a hop-skip and a jump away from an actual slave driver. These could have easily been generic quest givers, but their personalities and performances come to life with a tangibility rare in the Ubisoft-style open world game, which I do think this is.

The emotional drives of Deacon's early game journey make for compelling viewing, and some quests that simply play out a small scene with his close Biker friend Boomer as they work through their plan to head north are the substance of this decidedly narrative-championing open world title. Of course, quite early on their plan hits a major snag as Boomer suffers a serious injury and Deacon is forced to stick around for a while longer, running bounties for Copeland and putting up with the small smatterings of society that he is trying to run away from. Deacon is not presented as an obvious character, who presents all his thoughts out loud to the audience lest they get lost, his story is presented largely in performance instead.

As the story progresses a tighter ring of plot is closed around the story, actions start to pick up and actual stakes are introduced to balance against the whims and wants of the characters- putting everyone to the test. My one critique in this regard would have to be the villains of this game, who aren't given the time to become as developed as everyone else. None of which are cookie cutter wastes of time, mind you, but there's never really given any moral weight about the decision to go kill the big bad guy. It's just- 'this guy is crazy and killing him is very obviously the correct course of action', which seems strange in a story where the question of pacifism and the cycle of violence is raised as a significant plot point; and meets a somewhat... unorthodox answer in the last act of the game. Even in messaging Days Gone is decidedly non-average.

When the game hits it's conclusion there is a genuine wealth of progress made both in the core narrative and the progression of Deacon as a character to such a point that he feels naturally developed, rather than yanked into being the 'hero' character he needs to be... and then the game keeps going. Yeah, just like with The Phantom Pain, Days Gone has the conclusion of it's plot at the halfway mark and then tries to restart all of it's momentum from scratch in order to tell a whole other half of game. It feels like the Days Gone we got was actually the original game and the sequel welded together, and though there's significant plot development, a whole cast of new characters and a fresh journey to go for Deacon to mature just a little bit more- it doesn't hit as hard as the first half of the game does.

Perhaps that might be because the game itself runs out of new tricks to keep throwing the player's way except for slightly more durable versions of the enemies you already know and supremely frustratingly annoying zombie birds. (There have never been good zombie birds, why do we keep getting them as an idea?) Most of the late game missions are literal fetch quests picking out Styrofoam cups from the back of overturned trucks- and after the crazy high stakes of the mid-game finale it just feels like you're spinning wheels. The story loses a touch of it's grounded maturity too, slipping into the farcical and overexaggerated with a religiously charged comic book psycho militia general with confused ideals and a purposefully unfocused plan. And the finale just slips into action movie farce- it's a bit of a shame really.

Days Gone also has a strange relationship with it's side content, in that you're often contacted to go pick up side quests- but those quests are always bounty hunts. It's seems as though there might have once been more variety for what the various settlements could ask of Deacon, but that got lost somewhere in translation? The world is dotted with exploration objectives, most of which promise actual decent rewards like exclusive weapons or stat boosts, elevating them above your typical Ubisoft open world objective, and there's a touch of personality tucked away in the smallest corners of the map. Special animations or encounters you'll only find in one place across the whole game, all crediting to a specially attentive world space. If only there was a bit more variety in world activities to give exploration a little more of a shelf life. As it happens, I stopped playing not too long after finishing the game and just looked up the several post game scenes online. 

In conclusion

Days Gone is a victim, of it's environment as a story-based open world zombie game that got quickly railroaded by the king of that genre which released around about the same time. It treats it's audience with a level of maturity uncommon of other titles in this vein, and though the second half of the game loses it's edge- the strengths are not overwritten by the flaws. I still wonder whether or not the 'Open World' design angle was the best way to go to suit this story, but Bend Studio gave it a solid shot regardless creating a Woodland backdrop worth experiencing at least once. I would actually recommend this game to those who missed it the first time around, especially for the sorts of prices you can find the game at nowadays- it's a steal! As for the actual rating- that might be a little bit harder. Were it not for the second half of this game I could honestly justify going into the A's- but being as long toothed as it is, dragging out the story where it didn't need to, I'm going to have to settle with a respectable B+ Grade in my arbitrary scale- which is several notches higher than I ever expected to go, let me tell you! It's honestly a shame we'll never get a sequel- I wonder where the franchise could have gone next.