Days Gone Review (Purple Toupee)
This is honestly one of the best single player games I've played in recent memory, let alone in the gaming market.
The setting is done beautiful and the plot is extremely well written, with characters that you'll come to like fast. There's a nice variety of locations, none of which feel they overstay their welcome.
Of course with any game, there are downfalls. The combat system is on the line of standard and awful. It'll take time getting used to how the guns work, but there isn't much variety. Rather than have a whole arsenal with each weapon having a specific purpose, the guns are basically direct upgrades of each other and there is no customization like Fallout 4 or Call Of Duty MW2019. I only used a handful of guns as they worked for all situations, and I was never incentivized to experiment with other guns. Enemies use the same guns from beginning to near the end, and only serve as a way for the player to continue fighting if they run out of ammo. You also cannot buy most throwables or melee weapons, but instead must hunt for materials to craft them. The melee system doesn't feature many weapons either, and the crafting system for them isn't explained well, if at all. You also cannot compare the stats of each melee weapon unless it's for one on the ground. At first I disliked the combat system, but eventually I got used to it.
Enemy variety is there, but it's nothing you haven't seen before. Freakers are nothing more than zombies with the typical heavy, screamer, and fast infected variants, which are very uncommon. Infected wolves and crows exist, but I never felt they were ever fun to fight. Infected children are also an enemy you have to fight sometimes, and it's exactly as messed up as it sounds. The human enemies have the basic hierarchy too, with your typical melee, ranged, heavy, sniper, and flamethrower units. The only unit I detested fighting against were snipers, as they could one shot your bike in the open world with zero warning and in the early game you won't have a sufficient ranged weapon to deal with them effectively. The AI is super basic as well and sometimes they'll just run up to you, making for an easy kill. I wish the AI would use squad tactics to actually work together and communicate to fight the player, which is rare to find in a game. The prime example of this is are the Replica squads in FEAR (2005) in which the AI communicates with each other and reacts to player actions accordingly. If a 17 year old game can do this, than any modern game should be capable of this. Seriously, watch this to see what I mean.
The highlight enemy of the game are the hordes, which is literally hundreds of Freakers that dwell in one place during the day, or roam around during the night. The most tense and exhilarating moments were when I had to fight them or sneak past them, and it's beautifully done to where no matter how big your arsenal is, you will always feel like you don't have a winning chance. Spoiler alert: you will be forced to fight a few hordes to progress the story. That being said, my game did crash several times while fighting hordes so lower end hardware may not be able to handle the amount of NPCs in those sections.
While the story is very well written, some of the characters fall flat. There are a few characters either mentioned or shown in the game that the game tries to force you to care about, but fails since it doesn't show the relationship and interaction between said character and Deacon. For example, (major spoiler) when you find out the leader of the Rippers is someone from your old motorcycle crew whom you helped mutilate, I didn't care at all because the game doesn't show who this person was from before, his relationship to Deacon, or what he did to receive such a punishment. The story basically does "tell, not show" instead of "show, not tell" at some points, but thankfully it's not for the entire game.
Some of the missions shouldn't be cutscenes, and some of the cutscenes should've been missions. There are some flashback "missions" but they only consist of walking very slowly alongside an NPC, or a cutscene. Some of the missions in the current day are also just short cutscenes. While the flashback cutscenes and missions are shown well, there are some that would benefit from actual gameplay, and some that could've just been cutscenes.
There is a lot to explore in the game with a wide open map and good variety, but it can feel tedious. The fetch quests are generally the same, with only a few offering different experiences. They generally consist of "go here, kill everyone" but a few missions stick out because while the goal is the same, the experience while fighting for that goal is the same. I wish they did this for much more of the fetch quests rather than just a few.
While it seems that I bashed the game a lot, I feel that the strong points of the game are done so well that they outweigh the negatives. It took me about 31 hours to complete the main story with a good amount of side content, but I'm not even close to completing 100% of the game as there's a ton of side content to complete. The characters that are written strongly, that being most of them, are ones that I've come to care about and kept me interested in the story and game to see what their fate would be.
Unfortunately Sony rejected a sequel due to expectations not met on sales, which is a shame because this game deserves and has a strong potential for a sequel. I highly recommend this game, as long as you know what you're getting into.