Days Gone

I played it on another platform. I really enjoyed this game. The shooting is very satisfying the story is pretty good. The zombies are a bit different here than most games, they're very fast and aggressive. They're still not very deadly on their own, but in a horde they can tear to you pieces in a few seconds. That is the game's major innovation. Once you get the right gear and tactics, it is fun to wipe out hundreds of zombies at once. There's a good variety of missions and lots of upgrades and weapons to unlock that are pretty well paced, all the way up to the end of the game. The story is quite dark and the characters can be a little hard to like, but all in all I found myself pulled in. The writing and dialog are good, though at times a bit broody. The acting is great, especially the main character who is a pretty prolific Hollywood actor. There's a good bit a replayability with the challenges (which are quite tough) and new game plus. I'm on my second playthrough. This game is on sale a lot, but definitely worth full price. There is a ton of content and it is a very well made game.

This was a surprise love for me. This game has so many facets that i enjoy. Bikes, guns, romance, revenge, redemption. Just a well written, well paced game. This game has a main character growth arc that is simply fun to experence. There is enough RPG that you can influence your build. By the end of the game you are a total bad-ass but the game is tough at first. I got the game well after an alledged rocky stat but it ran perfectly for me at all times. You can't play thru this game and not identify with the protagonist at some point. Really a surprise hit. Havent been this pleasantly surprised in a long, long time. Just get it. This game is beautiful. The characters are relateable. Pacing is good. Weapon choice is a little meh, but its hardly enough to ding the game overall. I wish there was a sequal, prequal or anything attached to this game world. This game surely deserves it,

The environment is beautiful, the storyline is simple but engrossing, the gameplay is fluid, the whole thing is just an outstanding experience from start to finish. I don't know if I'm just fatigued with modern game developers (money grabbers) or not, but most open world games now are simply linear games but with copy/pasted repetitive mini-encounters between each dynamically loaded "level". A perfect example being most of the Far Cry games, the last in the series being littered with the same checkpoint with the same enemies and the same strategies every, single, time. This is one of the areas that Days Gone shines, of course, it does have filler, but the vast majority of the side-missions are tailored. They are not prefabs that have been spawned around the map with a random rotation, they are purposefully designed around the location, each requiring slightly different strategies. You get around on a bike, you can upgrade the bike to make it quieter, faster, larger fuel tank, more storage etc. Also, you have to maintain the bike, getting it fixed when damaged and topping the fuel up. The fuel situation adds a new level of immersion to travelling because you can fast travel from one location to another, but you use fuel in doing so, so you may have to take a detour to a location with some jerry cans or a fuel station. One of the big technological achievements for this game at the time was the hordes, they are HUGE and the quality of the models and animations is excellent. You cannot take on a horde without planning, finding choke points, setup mines along the route, using the environment (fuel tankers explode). I'm rambling, this is a great game, I've played through on the PlayStation, now I have it on GOG.

I usually skip dialogs in many games but not for this one. The stories around the different characters make sense in this world and they behave in a believable way. The only minor exception are random people you meet and they get annoying soon, but that's really the only issue i had with the game. Compared with other titles this is a minor annoyance. Would love to see a sequel and perhaps that one about Captain Kouri's because i found him a very interesting character and the way the game ends for him has a nice setup for a sequel already.

This gets compared to The Last of Us all the time, but I'd honestly say it's a better game with a better story and mostly likable characters. It's rough in a lot of areas though. The story, while unique in some ways, is standard and predictable in others, and feels simultaneously padded and missing content. Sadly, a lot of content was cut before release, including a major decisions system. The combat is enjoyable at first, but eventually becomes repetitive and far too easy, even on Survival II - the highest difficulty. Both human and freaker (zombie) enemies have only two fighting styles: sitting in one spot and inaccurately shooting at you, or charging straight at you. No tactics, no situational awareness, and no reactivity to the player, things that The Last of Us did surprisingly well. Nothing deep on the player's side either, boiling down to mashing buttons in melee or spamming a slow-mo "Focus" mode in ranged. The higlight of the game, its hordes, are fun and challenging, but they're static setpieces that never form naturally and only a couple of them ever respawn. Since you run into the biggest one in the game early on, you pretty much see them all. The game does look gorgeous, and playing on Steam, I never noticed any performance problems or stuttering. It sounds good for the most part, but some voice lines are inconsistently recorded or delivered (Deacon shouting at the top of his lungs during stealth sequences became a community meme) and the faces of minor NPCs look noticeably worse than the main characters. The soundtrack's great, with a subtle, "zombie western" style - think Telltale's Walking Dead games. On a scale of 1-10, I'd give this somewhere between a 6 and 7. It's a good game, however, that got unfairly maligned by critics at launch. Regardless, it needed more time, more story content, and a combat overhaul. On sale? More than worth it. Full price? I'd give it a pass.