Days Gone

In a world filled to the brim with zombie-themed games and open-world adventures, you’d think Days Gone would be the epitome of “enough is enough”. Days Gone unapologetically combines the two, warts and all, and leaves us wondering: Why even bother?

Well, Days Gone turned out to be a brain-eating surprise. I mean that in the best of ways. Hey, a million zombies eat brains – so it must be pretty good. Days Gone kept me hooked for way longer than it had any right to. When I was “done” in terms of what the game had to offer, I wasn’t really done on a personal level. I needed more.

As far as open-world zombie games goes, Days Gone may be the crème de la crème. I’m not sure if there’s any competition in that niche, but, let’s go with it anyway. Yeah, zombies have shuffled their way through countless games, movies, books and all that, to the point of absolute exhaustion for most, but there’s just something about those darn undying rascals that I find truly captivating.

Now, Days Gone doesn’t reinvent the open-world game. Not at all. In fact, it embraces it. Maybe to its detriment, needing to stand out and all that, but for me, there’s comfort in the familiar. Literally all the tropes of your bog-standard open-world game are there, from the towers you gotta climb to the collectables you gotta find, the skill tree and the experience points you need, the dozens and dozens of map markers, the bandit camps. You know the deal.

The true standout of Days Gone is your motorcycle. Deacon, our hero, has his bike stolen early on in the game, meaning you gotta build yourself a new one. Well. Not quite. What it really means is doing various missions for the different factions of the game to unlock new parts to buy. It’s not so much building as it is just buying the best part that camp has to offer and forgetting about it.

But whatever. The bike, man, the bike. Riding the bike feels friggin’ great. It’s not just a vehicle. It’s a roaring, two-wheeled companion. Deek’s lifelife in this desolate world full of dangers. Riding through rugged terrain or bumpy country-side roads is an experience unlike any other. It really is the freedom of the open road, the wind in your hair, roar of the engine, all that… in a game! If it weren’t for the fact that you run out of gas near constantly I would’ve just spent all my time driving round and round.  

The narrative has its moments too, for what it’s worth. I really liked Deacon. Not as a character, mind you, he’s a dumb idiot most of time. But Sam Witwer’s portrayal of the character. I totally, fully, believed that this character was real. A real person. An idiot. But a person. He’s this former marine turned criminal biker that has fully adapted to the situation at hand. The world being an absolute shithole seems to make perfect sense to him, and he has no problem doing what it takes to survive.

Of course, like most (if not all) open-world games, there’s the issue of disjointed storytelling. When you can’t push the player into doing certain things, you lose pacing, the player might do things before they’re intended to, and so on. Nevertheless Days Gone manages to drag you along on a journey of struggle, despair, hopelessness, redemption, and probably some other nouns too. Yeah, if you’ve ever seen a movie before, it’s nothing new. Like I said, this game is trope haven.

There’s definitely room for improvement. Some restructuring could’ve helped. Maybe cutting out a part of two, or scaling something down. Especially that ending. Whew. Like they didn’t really know how to wrap it up.  But, that’s alright. It’s a video game after all. Game. Not highbrow art. We’re in it for the gameplay, hopefully. And its narrative is interesting enough that it keeps you onboard for all the bits in-between the real good stuff – i.e. the riding your bike across Oregon, and mowing down thousands of zombies.

Yeah.

Thousands of zombies.

Well, not all at once, but you get close a couple times. The game has actual hordes of zombies you can fight. It’s optional for most of the game… until it isn’t. And if you haven’t had any practice taking out a horde by then, well shucks, you’re gonna get swallowed whole, boy. Well, more likely is that you’ll be swallowed in a thousand tiny pieces. These hordes range from a few dozen zombies in their smallest, uh, gaggles, to several hundred in the larger ones. And while you could just run around like an idiot being chased by a few dozen zombies, trying to take them down with your shotgun, a better strategy is probably needed for the bigger hordes.

No matter how you choose to tackle them, it is exhilarating fighting them. Combine that with the biking around, and honestly, I don’t know what else is needed. The game could’ve just been that and I would’ve been a happy camper.