DAYS GONE: First Impressions Suggest A Messy Game With Some Major Performance Issues And A Lot Of Potential

Days Gone shows a lot of potential when it comes to offering a large world to explore. There are some trace echoes of other Sony exclusive titles like The Last of Us and Horizon to be found in its presentation and environmental design, which aren't bad influences to have on this open-world title. Even though it was a brief demo that only scratched the surface of what we can expect in the final game, I was impressed with how much of content and sights there were to see. While you can follow the story missions pretty closely, there are a number of cool side-objectives and challenging moments to be found off the golden path--such as trying to sneak through a freaker-infested lumberyard, which went horribly wrong in my case and resulted in me having to high-tail it back to my bike.

It's a messy game, this, which fits the theme, but isn't always a good thing. In my brief go I struggled to get the camera, aiming and Deacon's movement, all of which succumb to laggy drift, to line up. Choppy performance didn't help. Faced with the zerg-rush zombies, I found it easier to wade into the fray with melee weapons, although the baseball bats and table legs I could find had extremely low durability, and it all got a bit slapstick. I didn't have so much trouble picking off the armed survivalists at a rival encampment with my pistol and a purloined shotgun. Their behaviours were easy to predict and the combat seemed to work more smoothly at range. But it could have been any firefight in any collection of rusty corrugated lean-tos in any game of the last decade. It doesn't feel like Days Gone is going to distinguish itself with refined combat mechanics - but then again, how many sprawling open-world games do?

With this demo, I was a little disappointed, as there wasn’t as much dramatic action. Creative director John Garvin briefed me on it and said it took place about an hour into the game. The narrative introduces the bounty hunter hero Deacon St. John, in a linear story for the first hour. Then the story pauses and allows you to explore the Oregon wilderness in a kind of open world level. It reminds me of the wide open level in the middle of the linear story of Uncharted: The Lost Legacy, from last year. That game showed an open area could serve the purpose of giving gamers freedom to explore as well as a variety of missions to choose. Garvin said this level was not so different, though I didn’t get enough time to see just how big the wilderness was.

It feels like an Uncharted game at this point. That's really the problem with this demo of Days Gone. A few years ago, this would've been great, but in 2018 it feels familiar. Well done, but familiar. If you look at screenshots or video, Days Gone looks and plays like other games: The Last of Us, Uncharted, State of Decay, Mad Max, Far Cry 5. It looks similar to popular TV shows like The Walking Dead and Sons of Anarchy. What I saw in the demo doesn't stand out, especially in terms of PlayStation exclusives that keep raising the bar like Horizon: Zero Dawn, Uncharted: Lost Legacy, and God of War. Perhaps Days Gone has more of the larger freaker hordes, as the Bend dev confirmed they still exist in the game, alongside infestation areas. Freakers come out in force at night, but right now there doesn't seem to be a risk-reward reason to face them in the dark. Maybe the characters will shine a bit more once I spend more time with Deacon and his supporting cast. Perhaps there are more systemic options available in terms of play; the developer hinted that I could lead a group of freakers into the hostile human outpost to soften both groups up. Maybe I'll grow to care more about the bike in actual play. There are hints here and there of Days Gone being something more, but they were just hints in my demo. 

The good news for a game about a misanthropic biker is that the bike handles just the way you want it to: fast and agile, even when you give up on the dirt tracks and take it off-road to plow straight through a pack of wolves. As any zombie movie will tell you, transportation is an incredibly powerful tool to have at your disposal in a ruined world, and Days Gone highlights its value with a fat menu of motorcycle upgrades and the constant threat of catastrophic damage or fuel droughts. Yes, you can walk around the world - and until you get a good muffler, you'll need to now and again to avoid alerting enemies to your location - but the bike gives you speed so you can outrun threats, and power so you can take a few Freakers out while you're on the road. I like the extra edge it gives to the survival challenge, but if you're one of those people who cries about degrading weapons in games, you might want to stock up on the Kleenex now.

Despite the issues though, we're quite willing to forgive the game for its occasional drops in framerate and choppy performance in one of two areas. There's still plenty of time to fix these issues and some of the more peculiar bugs we saw, such as the AK47 which bounced towards us - honest to god - like a Basketball after being dropped by the guy we shot from ten yards. The important factor is that the game doesn't feel like it's hiding wholesale problems. It feels really solid for a game not due for release for another 8 or 9 months. Providing it doesn't launch with these sort of problems like, say, State of Decay 2, it should be just fine. There is, however, one much deeper problem with Days Gone at its core. It feels, from what we've seen during our time with the game, a little homogeneous.

Set in the beautiful, volcanic scarred high-desert of the Pacific Northwest, Days Gone is an open-world action-adventure game where you play as Deacon St. John, a Drifter and bounty hunter who would rather risk the dangers of the broken road than live in one of the “safe” wilderness encampments.