Days Gone Review
I kept on hearing about this game and i kept on hearing the dev complain about the game wasn't getting a sequel and complain to Sony, it was kinda annoying but i decided to try out finally.
I don't really enjoy zombie games anymore there old and boring now. I loved Resident Evil it was the best zombie game but even that has gotten stale and lazy. The games are half-good and half-bad but will always sell because newer fans are blinded that the new Resident Evil's are great...
I think the last zombie game that wasn't Resident Evil i played was Last Of Us 2 and that game was just boring as hell. Before Last Of Us 2 it probably was Dead Rising 4 and that was okay, wasn't nowhere near the 1st and 2nd. The last zombie game i liked was maybe Dead Island. I think i beat that game like 4 times.I tried Dying Light 1 but it was also boring and i couldn't get into it. So i decided to attempt another zombie...er Infected game, lets call it infected game since they don't say zombies. I went into Days Gone expecting not to like it but i actually liked the game.
This will have spoilers because i feel like the Story will make or break the game for people because the gameplay is your standard open world stuff you seen in countless other games.
Characters
Deacon St.John i heard people thought he was a boring character in the game but he is not boring at all. He is a drifter and was part of a motorcycle club, like a gang with his best friend Boozer. He was also in the military but left it. His relationship with his Wife Sarah is really good they are very fun together. Deacon got like a sarcastic humor when hes with her and hes funny with her and stuff. His relationship with Boozer his best friend is one of the highlights of the game. Hes the only person he really has left after losing his wife and its like his brother. He does whatever he can for him. Deacon is voiced and modeled after the actor Sam Witwer who is a great actor and has always done great things. He was the voice and model of The Apprenctice in The Force Unleashed, he was in season 8 of Smallville, he also was in a series called Being Human. So hes a great actor and does an amazing job as Deacon. Deacon feels like a really different character the way he reacts to situations, like hes scared and out of breath and has to keep himself together against the freakers, the infected in the game.
Boozer is Deacons friend and considered brother he was with Deacon when the outbreak happened and was also part of the Biker gang or club with Deacon. I really thought i wasn't gonna like Boozer from his character design with tattoos on his head and stuff he just looked like he was gonna be an annoying dick lmao, but he was not. Boozer goes through hell in the game, he gets his arm blow torched and he gets blood poisoning and kinda loses the will to live. Deacon has to kind of bring him back from his depression. Boozer though his interaction with Deacon is really good, and you would think Boozer would be the crazy one of the two but its really Deacon but Boozer will do whatever he can to help Deacon.
Iron mike who you meet later in the game is a pacifist and runs a camp and want nothing but peace and doesn't want fighting and killing. He refuses to kill people. After a tragic event he witnessed occurs he doesn't want to witness the violence and carnage of that again.
Rikki i liked Rikki Deacon i guess was with her in the past until he left because being a drifter he doesn't stay in a place for to long. Shes tough but kind shes also in a relationship with a girl in the game although there relationship never felt that close.
Sarah, Deacons presumed dead wife is really great. No spoilers but you see her in flashbacks from Deacons past. She was a researcher who met Deacon because she wanted to research a plant. She works with a government research agency giving her research to them and stuff. Her and Deacon are great together the way they act with eachother and stuff.
Theres more characters you meet later on and there pretty good to.
Enemies
Theres normal Freakers thats what the infected are called. Theres Breakers which are strong and powerful enemies. Theres Screamers which scream and attract freakers to you, also stun you if your close. Theres Criers which are Crows. There are newts which are infected adolescents. Than theres a fast Freaker.... I forget the name of it its like more evolved.
Than theres the human enemies like the Rippers, The Anarchist, The Marauders, Soldiers. I mean they just got different apperances but act the same really they try to kill you with guns and melee weapons.
Story
A virus outbreak occurs infecting the population. Deacon St.John in a flash back is helping his wife who was stabbed by a little girl. He gets her to a rescue Nero chopper to put his wife on, but theres only two seats available. His best friend Boozer is with him and hes hurt from his leg, Boozer tells him to go on with his wife but Deacon decides to stay with Boozer knowing he ain't gonna make it on his own. He ask O Brian, the Doctor on the chopper where hes heading so he can follow them.
2 years pass since the outbreak in a post apocalyptic Oregon, and Deacon and Boozer are trying to stay alive together. They ride on there motorcycles to catch this guy who has a bounty on him, this guy beat a girl to death so Deacon and Boozer kill him. Deacon than needs parts for his bike so him and Boozer have to go to an infested gas station to get the parts. Deacon with help from Boozer luring the infected away gets the part but Boozer gets attacked by this group called Rippers. They use a blow torch to burn Boozers arm basically trying to burn off his tattoos on his arm. Deacon saves him but Boozers badly hurt so he takes him to a hideout they stay at so Boozer can recover.
Boozer isn't doing well so Deacon goes out to get him supplies to ease his pain and do whatever he can. During that though Deacon sees a Nero Helicopter fly past him and tails it. He infiltrates where they land and listen to what there doing. The Nero scientist are taking test about the freakers which are what the infected are called.
Deacon hears a familiar name from one of scientist which is O Brian, the same guy who took his wife on the chopper two years ago. Deacon tracks O Brian down figuring since he's alive his wife is to. Deacon confronts him and demands answers and wants O brian to check to see if shes alive. Deacon goes back to Boozer and sees he has blood poisoning from his arm and now he needs to take him to a place he didn't want to go back to, to a guy called Iron mike. This is where the game really picks up and gets good.
Exploration
Like i said its your standard open world game with things on the map to do, things such as Eliminating Enemy areas. There are Marauder camps, there are anarchist camps. Both of these are just killing all the enemies. The marauder camps usually have a bunker to find and these bunkers give a recipe so you can craft an item.
There are the Horde freaker nest scattered all throughout the map, to clear these you got to burn them with Molotovs.
The Nero Checkpoints are throughout the map as well and these are camps where you have to restore power to go inside. Most you have to find fuel and turn the power on but later that changes to finding fuses. Inside you find a Nero Injector and these raises one thing on Deacon. You can raise his health, his stamina or his focus.
Than there are bounty missions from the survivor camps you get which is just more of the same which is killing a certain person and reporting back. It can also be saving someone whos captured. Doing these bounties missions kind of raise your standing in the camps and this is where you get money in the game. The camps have where you can buy and sell stuff like weapons and sell animal skins and Freaker ears you get everytime you kill one. The camps have levels usually 3 levels, each level unlocks new weapons this is a negative though which ill get to later.
Theres Sarahs grave stone you go to as well. Deacon talks to the grave and talks about whats been happening with everything which i liked.
Last but not least is another highlight of the game called Hordes. Hordes are made up of like 50 to 100 or maybe more zombies and they act as one. If they see you than your gonna have 100 zombies on your ass chasing you. These are very cool when you just have a whole mob after you and your running for you life or your trying to hurry your ass to your bike. You go in buildings and they just break through the windows and they can get go from multiple sides trapping you its just chaotic. You really can't take these on til your prepared.
Gameplay
One of the main things of the game is Deacons bike. Its an important part of the game, you have to refill it with Fuel when it runs out and you have to repair it when it gets damaged from scrap you find. You can also upgrade it from the camps and change its appearance.
Deacons gets guns and traps he can use, its usually one primary, one secondary than a special unique weapon like a sniper. Theres handguns,Shotguns, Assault Rifles, Snipers, Bows, Light Machine Guns and SMG's. Deacon also gets melee weapons which you get from exploring the world but these break after time. you can use the scrap to repair them though and also get stronger crafting recipes to get stronger melee weapons.
I heard some stuff about the guns being horrible in this game and its all bullshit. Thats only because you get bad weapons early on that are low quality but later when you get better weapons the gunplay is fine and is easy. I think people are just impatient, i feel as you progress Deacon gets better and better with combat if you get the right abilities and stuff. Shit i think Last Of Us 2 gunplay was bad and Days Gone is better lol
Deacon also gets skill points you can use in 3 categories. Ones i think Stealth, Survival and combat and there quite a bit of skills to get.
Negatives
It being a standard open world is a negative. It doesn't do nothing new if you complain about Ubisoft games....but not Pokemon.... About being the same your not gonna like Days gone.
The survivor camps getting missions is very annoying. You will accept a mission, report back, and leave and you'll go to a different place but than they will call you and tell you they got another one, so you go all the way back to accept it. I don't understand why you have to leave the damn place to get a new mission, why can't you just accept multiple missions. If you have fast travel thats not an issue, but i hate fast travel and i played on Survival difficulty so there is no fast travel anyway.
Another thing in the camps is leveling the camps is so damn slow. The progression to leveling these up seems like they want you to grind for it, because you can sell animal skins and freaker ears to the vendors in the camps and they give you a bit of points. The missions and bounties give you the most points but this is mainly only enough to level up maybe 2 times. You have to level these up for better equipment and upgrades to. You'll still be fine you wait till you go to more survival camps for better weapons i guess. I don't know if they did this for new game plus or just on purpose to make it a grind to do. If the progressions went faster you could have got way better weapons early, but i did all the missions in the camps and i still wasnt leveled to 3 in 2 camps
Next Negative the game starts out very slow, when i talked about the story that was like the first 10 maybe 15 hours of the game. If your impatient and want things to happen right away than you ain't gonna like it. Stuff don't happen til you meet Iron mike, thats when better characters are introduced. It also felt like the story at the start was all over the place like just random stuff happening and not a cohesive story until you get to Iron mike.
I had one glitch as well where i was fighting a horde in this one part and i guess i ran to far from them and they disappeared and than i went back and l like 100 just spawned out of nowhere, it was quite funny actually. I had one glitch where i dropped dead near my bike which was odd.
Final thoughts WITH SPOILERS
I went into Days Gone expecting not to like it but i found myself enjoying the story when it picked up. I enjoyed Deacon, Sam Witwers performance was great as him, he did an awesome job. While the open world aspect wasn't anything special really besides the freaker horde, theres not like a dull moment in the open world. I would be traveling and Marauders lay a clothesline trap which is a rope so you ride into and it knocks you off your bike and they ambush you. You could be riding on your bike than a sniper shoots your bike out. The freakers also have behaviors like at night theres not to many of them but morning they hibernate like they stay in caves and dark areas, so you be traveling and you stumble on a cave and you see like 100 damn freakers sleeping in there and you wake them up and they chase your ass. You can also see Hordes when your roaming around the open world and your just terrified and trying to sneak past them.
The game was pretty brutal at times to like the Ripper this cult tortures people to joining them they burn off people tattoos and stuff. They had this girl tied up leaving her for the freakers, Deacon goes to help her but it turns out they broke her legs and Deacon has to ease her suffering.
The story when it picked up it was good now some things were obvious. I was glad Deacon found his wife and was afraid she would be different or change or cheat on him or not get along anymore but that didn't happen and there were still great together. There wasnt really no villian of the game til the end when you meet the colonel in the military camp and you can just tell this guy was out of his damn mind. He hated murderers and thieves and liars and worships god and stuff and you pretty much know this guy is going after people and not the freakers.
It was an interesting thing with Sarah because shes making a weapon to kill the freakers and gets Deacon to help, only to find that she actually was trying to make a cure for them to bring them back, but it failed and didn't work but Deacon encouraged her to keep trying and that she was the only one who still saw them as people
I know people kind of hate when a zombie story kinda shifts to them not being the problem and its more of the humans, its what happens in Days Gone with the Colonel. I think its true though i think humans will be a more bigger problem during a zombie outbreak, from them killing other people, stealing, losing there damn minds, betraying people i think that is a big problem.
It is kind of a shame there won't be a 2nd one theres interesting directions they can take with Sarah if she does manage to make a cure and stuff. Sadly Sony only wants one Infected game and thats Last Of Us.
My score for Days Gone is an 8
