Days Gone: First Impressions

Days Gone gets off to a strange, disjointed start. It kind of just throws you into things. For the first few hours I wasn’t quite sure if Sarah – the woman our hero (Deacon) is mourning – was his sister or his wife. Spoiler: it was his wife. Maybe that’s on me. Maybe I missed a line of dialogue or misheard something. But even so, the opening of Days Gone is a little muddled. It takes a few hours for you to really find your footing.

The game is set in a world that’s seen some kind of virus turn people into zombies. They don’t call them zombies but that’s pretty much what they are. Not the slow kind, but the fast. You play as Deacon, a biker who survives in the wilderness with his best mate, Boozer. Yes, that’s really his name.

Deacon has a strange habit of either mumbling to himself or randomly shouting things. I don’t know if it’s a bug or if it’s some kind of suggestion that he’s lost his marbles living in this world. If it’s the latter, I can kind of understand the intent, but it sometimes happens in the middle of an otherwise ‘normal’ conversation which suggests it’s a bug. Maybe it’s a little of both? It does make Deacon oddly fun to play, though, when you imagine it’s because he’s totally unhinged.

Days Gone is an open world third person game and it does follow the open world ‘regional’ template that Ubisoft are so fond of – although not quite to the same, formulaic and tiresome degree. So far, I’ve ‘unlocked’ three regions, all of which have a similar pattern of content – camps, hordes, nests, evacuation posts and bandit hideouts – but the local terrain and the local characters do a good job of separating the regions, giving them a unique identity and providing the variety we need.

You’ll get about the world on your bike which is a pretty big part of the experience. Your bike needs fuel and fuel is limited. If you’re planning on a long drive you’ll actually need to plan your route in order to stop somewhere and refuel on the way – either that, or hope you can find some if you’re entering a new, unexplored area.

The fuel mechanic could have been incredibly irritating, but it’s actually not very punishing. You can conserve fuel by ‘coasting’ with your bike down hills, and fuel cans tend to be placed around pretty much every major structure you’ll come to. In the 17 hours I’ve played so far, I’ve only actually run out of fuel once.

But even this presented a pretty neat situation in which I had to hike on foot through a horde infested wood at night in order to find some fuel and then hike back again without getting eaten. It was tense and exciting and pretty fun. As you progress through the content and increase your ‘trust’ with each survivor camp, you’ll gain access to new bike parts, including bigger fuel tanks, so the issue becomes less and less of a concern as you go.

The pacing of Days Gone during the opening hours is a little odd, to say the least. 15 hours into the game and I was presented with what was essentially a ‘tutorial’ quest to clear out a local bandit camp. The problem is, I’d already cleared out about 3 camps before this either as part of a quest in another region, or just coming across them in the open world.

I wouldn’t say Days Gone drags its heels early on because you can pretty much just drive off and do what you want – but it does result in a weird situation where the game is almost trying to catch up with you and teach you about things that you’ve already been doing for several hours.

The PC port of Days Gone runs flawlessly and the game looks fantastic. That said, my performance went to shit after I updated my drivers, forcing me to roll back. By the time this post goes live, the issue with those new drivers may have been fixed, or they may have already been replaced. Either way, it’s something to keep in mind. At the time of writing I’m using the NVIDIA 466.27 drivers.

Aside from the driver issue, a single crash and a bug where a character got stuck on some stairs, forcing me to reload the mission in order to progress, I’d say that Days Gone has, overall, been a very stable and impressive port based on what I’ve experienced so far.

And, overall, I’m really quite enjoying it. Now that I’ve really got stuck into it, unlocked some new bike upgrades and got my hands on some better weapons, it feels like the game is really opening up. Fighting the ‘freakers’ is always fun, and taking down my first horde was a pretty tense and exciting moment as I really had to be smart and plan my approach.

The story stuff is interesting, but it doesn’t feel like I’ve really progressed very far with it at the moment. I guess that’s my main criticism of Days Gone right now – it sure takes it’s time to get going. But that’s okay. I don’t mind a slow burn as long as the game pays it off in the long run. For now, it’s back to random shouty Deacon who has another horde to kill, the crazy bastard.