Days Gone

This is the game that proves you shouldn’t always trust “professional” reviews. Even though I’m usually not drawn to zombie games, this one… is an excellent open-world experience! It reminded me of Mad Max: the gameplay isn’t groundbreaking and can be a bit repetitive, but everything it does, it does really well. Most importantly, the story and world are truly captivating. So if what you’ve seen has piqued your interest—don’t overthink it, just go for it. Especially on sale.

underrated

Solid design of stealth gameplay in zombie survival aplocilpse settings. Ticks all the boxes for what could be super gaming experince. Sadly it has come from consoles so it has 2 critical flaws. First - you can't just save game, have to be close to save point (bed or bike). It artificailly limits your gameplay sessions to long sittowns and often results in lost progress. Second - movemnt feels clunky and respond badly to mouse and keyboard stearing. It is playable but provides very bad experince, as if there was a delay betwen what you input and when your character reacts to. Overall I'd recomend it for people who can handle console game ports with gamepad. For old school PC player it is a bit disapointing and at times frustrating.

Just having recently played through Dying Light and Mad Max I couldn't help, but notice that Days Gone has managed to copy the most annoying mechanics of both games - weapon durability and fuel consumption. You kill three zombies - weapon is broken. You can carry ten bottles and ten rags, but at the same time you are limited to three molotovs? Combat turns very quickly into repair/crafting fest mid fight. Hordes - lure them and pop them. Also - the game is VERY repetative and requires going back and forth between same few locations from the other side of the map, but the motorcycle is running out of fuel faster than a fat kid through candies. Combine that with the choppy questline, spread thin by filler quests, and it gets really tedious. Speaking of combat - it's nothing to write home about - if the melee weapons were unbreakable, you'd be unstoppable... Stealth is passable, but guncombat is atrocious. The whole experience feels like the developers had a checklist of things they needed to have in the game: open world - check, meaningless upgrades - check, annoying sidekick - double-check. On the positive side - the game is very beautiful and the story looked interesting, but is dragged on for far too long between fetch quests, so you lose the narrative completely. Like Mad Max, it would have benefitted greatly by reducing and turning filler quests and objectives into meaningful missions and getting more focused on the story, instead of bouncing on and off between them.

The scarcity, the game's challenge, and story and the character development are all top notch.