Days Gone review – a game of fun and fury, signifying nothing 3 / 5 stars
The highly anticipated post-apocalyptic adventure builds a believable, thrilling world, but populates it with cardboard cut-out survivors
fter only 10 minutes, you realise something about Days Gone that will come to mind throughout the next 20 hours or so: it is as if Far Cry was set in a B-movie version of The Last of Us universe. If you’re okay with that, you’re going to have a heck of a ride.
The latest title from Sony’s SIE Bend Studio (responsible for the Syphon Filter series) is set in the beautiful, rural Pacific Northwest, after the spread of a virus that turns victims into the kind of absolutely-not-zombies we saw in Danny Boyle’s film 28 Days Later. Survivors either hole up together in paranoid communities or drift from one compound to the next, killing the infected for bounties.
Lead protagonist Deacon St John is a rootless biker who takes on tasks for these fragile clans, blasting monsters and thieves while grieving his lost wife, Sarah, a botanist who arrived in the area to study plant life before the pandemic and ended up falling for our sullen hero. At the beginning of the game, she is seriously wounded and airlifted to a medical tent, which is later overrun by the cannibalistic infected – neatly providing Deacon with the dead woman that action heroes so often need to give them depth. Now, his only friend is Boozer, who has a bald, heavily tattooed head but few other distinguishing characteristics.
The central gameplay loop may sound familiar. You take on missions, drive to specific locations and shoot stuff. Completing these tasks opens up the map and earns cash, which you can use to buy better weapons and upgrade your motorbike. You also clamber up a three-branched skill tree, improving your weapon handling, fighting and foraging abilities. In between, you explore the landscape, picking up randomised side quests, raiding bandit camps, unlocking fast travel points, and hunting animals for meat and skins that can be traded with communities. It will be so completely recognisable to fans of Ubisoft’s open-world games that you’d think it was Far Cry 5.5 or Assassin’s Creed: Armageddon.
That isn’t a bad thing, because Days Gone nails these systems extremely well. The infected – or “freakers” – are fantastically creepy enemies who respond to the player’s, and each other’s, sounds and movements with convincing animalistic intelligence. Rolling up to a deserted town or bandit camp, assessing the situation from a distance, then sneaking in using abandoned vehicles, buildings and foliage for cover is tense and exciting, and there are bear traps, exploding canisters and, later, remote bombs and proximity mines to set up, maximising your destructive power. If you’re smart, you can channel groups of wolves or passing freakers into enemy camps, sitting bThe landscape is also beautifully realised, with luscious forests, craggy mountains and densely detailed towns along every swooping highway; a real-time weather system deals out conditions ranging from swirling snow storms to scorching sunshine. This is a huge and convincing world, and the motorcycle is the perfect vehicle to discover it. Like the horse in Red Dead Redemption 2, you’re dependent on your bike throughout the game, repairing, customising and upgrading it as you go. At first your fuel tank can barely get you from one town to the next so Days Gone captures an authentic sense of postapocalyptic scarcity, often forcing you to traipse through the dangerous countryside, hoping to chance upon a petrol station or fuel canister.
Most battles are fought against gangs and small groups of infected civilians, but there are also hordes of freakers, though these play less of a role than trailers suggest. For most of the game, they can be avoided, but later on, with upgraded skills and weapons, they’re worth seeking out: taking them on is an epic endeavour, requiring lots of scouting, planning and stage management. Guiding dozens right into the path of an exploding petrol tanker is a destructive sight that few action games can compete with.
Thisis fine in a game that only aspires to be a blockbuster action flick, but Days Gone clearly wants us to emotionally engage with Deacon and the survivor communities. It doesn’t succeed. We’re expected to care about these people, yet they’re all unlikable and forgettable. We spend the first 10 hours of play knowing almost nothing about them. Why is Deacon so committed to Boozer? What did they do together that created this bond? With a name like Boozer, how are we meant to take him seriously as a sympathetic figure?
The romance between Deacon and Sarah is also unconvincing. Why did this cultured scientist fall for a charmless, monosyllabic man-child in a backwards baseball cap? For a 20-hour story, it is not enough for the writers just to go with, “Hey, opposites attract”.
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
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