Days Gone

A devastating virus has killed more than a third of the world's population and reduced millions more into violent, monstrous creatures called Freakers. Bikers Deacon St. John and William "Boozer" Gray, along with Deacon's wife Sarah, attempt to escape from the tidal wave of Freakers but are separated; Sarah, wounded and taken to a refugee camp which is subsequently overrun, is assumed dead. Two years later, Deacon and Boozer are working as couriers and hunters between several refuges in rural Oregon. With Boozer injured by a savage cult known as "Rippers," Deacon uncovers evidence that Sarah may still be alive. He resolves to find a way to travel south to learn the truth.

There's been lot of trends in video games in the last decade or so that have led to groans of over-familiarity. The idea of an open-world zombie survival game may sound particularly dispiriting, like several different gaming trends mashed together by committee.

Days Gone does not immediately alleviate concerns. The opening hours of the game are stodgy and predictable, with you roaming over a map ticking off icons, collecting a whole ton of different items, engaging in some light crafting and killing zombies either in melee, through gunplay or stealth. The opening hours of the story are not particularly compelling and the characters not hugely likeable, despite the presence of some very solid actors who also provide the visual models for their characters. Playing a character who not just sounds like Sam Witwer (Battlestar Galactica, Smallville, Supergirl) but looks like him is initially mildly disconcerting, but soon becomes fun.

However, something very odd happens as Days Gone progresses. It gets better. A lot better. The opening area of the game, consisting of tight roads and dirt paths through towering ravines and dreary, craggy valleys, expands into a much more fun-to-explore, semi-desert environment. Later on it expands to a mountainous region and then the infamous Crater Lake area of southern Oregon, here faithfully replicated. The story slowly becomes more interesting, bringing in NERO (the fictional agency tasked with wiping out the zombie plague), various cults and the several different settlements that Deacon allies with, each with its own cast of characters.

The central narrative, which draws heavily on Sons of Anarchy and The Walking Dead for inspiration, expands and becomes much more intriguing. The story is structured like a TV series, with season-long threats established which Deacon has to overcome through a series of episode-like individual missions. Unlike The Walking Dead, which has become infamous for dragging two or three episodes' worth of plot across entire sixteen-episode seasons, Days Gone does not hang around. Major threats are introduced and dispatched in relatively short order through relatively tightly-structured missions. The pacing is punchy, breaking up the game's imposing 60-hour length into shorter narrative arcs, each with its own location, cast of characters and subplots.

Mechanically, the game has you being given missions to do in various locations. These take the format of story missions, with plenty of pre-rendered cutscenes, and optional side-quests, like taking down various bandit camps, reactivating NERO refugee camps or destroying Freaker nests. The game's combat, driving (Deacon gets around by using his own, highly customisable bike) and stealth are all initially serviceable, but become more enjoyable as the game progresses and you unlock new skills. Skill points are not massively commonplace, making the choice of when to choose to gain new skills more meaningful than in most games of this type. You can also upgrade your health, stamina and "focus," effectively a reservoir of energy that allows you to enter a bullet-time-like state (which is occasionally useful but mostly is not, and can be avoided). There's also a fast-travel system, which to be honest is pretty pointless: the game's map is relatively fast to traverse and the vistas are so pretty that it's more enjoyable just to drive everywhere.

All of this initially feels same old same old, and Days Gone's biggest sin is not doing enough to make its opening hours distinctive. Dying Light overcame open world fatigue and map icon-hoovering tedium with fast-paced parkour and first-person zombie-slaying action, whilst most games of this type show their hands early, by giving you a steadily escalating number of options and skills in the opening hours of a game (although often at the cost of later hours of the game turning into repetitive grinds). However, by drop-feeding new ideas, activities, areas and mission types consistently across its length, Days Gone maintains greater interest in the long run. ~45 hours into the game a completely new, major activity is dropped into your lap providing hours' worth of entertainment. The game does a surprising job of staying fresh and each set of new missions and new characters is more compelling than the last.

Problems with the game do persist. It's far too late in the game when you can finally upgrade your bike's petrol tank to the point you don't have to worry about running out every five minutes or so. I'm a bit over crafting at this point as a game mechanic, and although Days Gone's crafting system is fairly minimal, it still feels like it could have been removed without too much trouble. The game's stealth system is pretty much solely built around one weapon (the very fun crossbow) but the weapon is slow to reload and sometimes clumsy to use; you also cannot move bodies, so stealth-infiltrations of enemy camps are very difficult to pull off without detection. There's also something of an epilogue hinting at another big story to come, which unfortunately does not seem likely to happen (despite selling between 6 and 9 million copies, a sequel is apparently not on the cards).

But I forgive the game for all of its flaws for its killer app: the Hordes. These are vast accumulations of Freakers, the largest numbering some 500 individuals, which swarm over the landscape like locusts. The first time you see one of these things it's very easy to freak out. Engaging a horde initially appears utterly impossible, and the game spends some time recommending you don't even think about engaging them. But, once you have upgraded your stamina and you've unlocked large area-of-effect weapons like napalm bombs and proximity bombs, dealing with Hordes becomes more viable and easily the game's highlight. It is tremendous fun to track down each Horde and then choose to engage them by day (which usually involves fighting them underground or in caves) or night (when you can fight them in the open) and working out what tactics and weapons to use.

Days Gone (****) is a slow-burn of a game, whose opening hours do not impress and which suffers from moments of predictable open-world jank throughout. But give the game enough time, and a rich story, interesting cast of characters and some fantastic action setpieces eventually emerge. The game is available now on PlayStation 4 and PC.