Dayse Gone is a game which comes developed by SIE Bend Studio who some may know as the developers of the Syphon Filter series and most recently for their work on Uncharted: Golden Abyss. Days Gone was published by Sony Interactive Entertainment and is available exclusively for the PS4.
In Days Gone the player will become Deacon St. John who is a survivor of the apocalypse that wiped out society. During the early events in the game, Deacon is separated from his wife and she could quite possibly be dead. Fast forward 2 years and Deacon is still on the quest trying to find her, but the world has changed and it is filled with dangerous threats and nothing is easy!
Before Days Gone came out earlier this year, I had just come out of playing Red Dead Redemption 2 which is probably one of the best games of this generation. It was also a very long game and took me some time to finish, jumping into Days Gone, I found myself almost immediately immersed in another long and epic game and I was not ready for it. The problem I had initially with this game and actually for my entire playthrough is that for some reason the game seems to lag and struggle to load during longer sessions. The frame rate drops and things do really slow down, especially when on the bike. This can be very frustrating and does take the player out of the world. I’m not sure if the problem persists on a PS4 pro but on my launch day PS4, it struggled to load the game sometimes and it seems I was not the only one to experience this.
When I first started playing the game when it first released, I was slowly getting through it, but eventually actually just stopped playing. While the story had me interested, it is actually very slow to get started and it takes some time before it starts to get good. It wasn’t until a month or two later that I heard that there had been some updates made to the game from the developers and I went back in hoping for the best. I started the game all over again and I lowered the difficulty to easy so I could just focus on the story. This time, I got quite into it. The performance issues were still present, but not as bad as before and I powered through. I have to say that I am glad that I did because Days Gone was one of the best single player story games I’ve played this year. I am also glad that the developers stood by the game and put out updates after it launched. It’s still a bit glitchy, but I tolerated it. It’s just, if you are planning to play Days Gone, make sure you have a decent amount of time to dedicate to it.
The story of Days Gone sees you play as Deacon throughout the entire 50 hour+ epic. In this time you will get to know this character very well and see him develop and change as it progresses. Deacon is a very angry man who has a problem with almost everything in his current world. This stems from his experiences with different groups, much of which were negative ones. Deacon and his only friend, Boozer, are drifters and don’t seem to want to get involved with any of the groups that have formed in the society. When Boozer is injured early in the game, Deacon is forced to interact with various societies and the player slowly gains a perspective into what the world of Days Gone is all about. By getting involved in the world, Deacon is also able to make progress in his quest to find his lost wife.
In the world of Days Gone there are different groups that you will encounter. There’s NERO who are a bunch of government researchers and the people who Deacon lost his wife to early in the game. There’s human societies which are spread throughout the map and are clinging to what was, while at the same time trying to survive and make something of the new world. There are the hordes of the undead which are all basically just zombies/infected people that are killing everyone and there’s the rippers who are groups of cannibilistic people that love the undead and want to be like them. It’s basically a world that’s a mess and I don’t really blame Deacon for being a drifter.
Days Gone Gaming Deals
The gameplay of Days Gone is a mixture of gun based combat and melee combat. Throughout the game, the player will unlock various new weapons which are useful for taking down different enemies. In terms of the guns in the game, there’s rifles, sniper rifles, shotguns, handguns, automatic weapons and a crossbow. As for the melee weapons, there’s all sorts of bats, machetes and knives. Some of the weapons are customisable in that you can put attachments on certain guns to silence them or you can craft different types of ammunition for the cross bow such as poison darts. You can also upgrade and craft your melee weapons by combining scrap and other components to make them into stronger melee weapons. The guns are all great, my only problem with them is that it takes actually a very long time to unlock all of the good weapons. For much of the game and definitely for the first 10 hours or so, you won’t be well equipped enough to take on anything too large. Even towards the end of the game as I passed 40 hours with it, I was still unlocking weapons that would have been nice to have a little sooner.
The game’s open world is actually very nice to explore. I have not been to Oregon and I have no idea what is there so don’t know what it’s meant to look like. But exploring it with Deacon will see you experience all kinds of different environments such as mountains, woodlands, desert and urban. The game also changes as you play with the environments being very green in the beginning, but slowly as the days pass by, things will start to get cold and it will snow. I appreciated these changes in the game and as the story is a long one, it’s nice to see the environments change as you get through it. It helps to add a lot of realism to the experience.
For much of the game Deacon will travel through the map either on foot or on his bike. At first the bike will be very slow, but it is upgradable as you progress through the game. There are colour customisations and also things like nitrous boosts that you can buy.
The currency in the game is earned by taking down hordes or completing various missions. Each camp has their own credits system and you will need to gain loyalty points in the camp before you can buy anything. The loyalty points take a very long time to earn and if you were to just play the story without any of the side missions, I doubt you could earn the top levels. The top levels of camp loyalty are needed so that you can buy the best weapons or bike upgrades. These are necessary as it makes getting through the game much easier.
By the end of it all once I finally did get through all the side missions, all the main missions and unlocked most of what was in the game, I was having a lot of fun. Now I know, I whinged quite a bit this review about having to unlock everything and how long it took. But in end, once I did do it, I felt very satisfied and very accomplished. I spent so long on the game, that I ended up unlocking everything I could to see all that Days Gone had to offer. Due to this, I am now the proud owner of a Days Gone platinum trophy!
In the end it occurred to me after my time with the game that although I found quite a bit of the game difficult and time consuming. That Days actually offered me as a player more than just a simple story I needed to play through and experience. It offered me a challenge. It was tough to take down all the hordes, it was challenging to find all the hidden enemy camp locations and when I got stuck in the middle of nowhere and could not ride my bike to safety unless I refueled it. It was a survival mission to run out alone looking for fuel. This is what a game is meant to be, it’s meant to offer a player a challenge, something to beat and something to overcome. In the end, Days Gone offered me both an interesting story and a solid challenge and I loved that about the experience.
