It’s easy to judge a game before it comes out for most fans. It is even easier when that game’s main antagonist is a bunch of zombies. Zombie games have been getting a bad rap for quite some time now, mostly due to the overabundance of such games. If you are only a casual fan of zombies, then you are probably annoyed with all the games that have come out within the last five years. There are games like the Dead Rising Series (4 Games), Dying Light and the Dead Island Series (2 Games), just to name a few. With so many games falling under the category of “Zombie Game” it isn’t surprising that a game like Days Gone can struggle to differentiate itself. What does succeed for Days Gone can’t be easily marketed in 60 second trailers that you see on TV or YouTube.
You can’t see how great a character Deacon St. John is. You aren’t able to see how awesome it is to take out a massive horde by yourself, the only way to understand is to actually play it yourself. So many things in this game are better off experiencing, rather than hearing about them from someone else. I believe that Days Gone is one of the best games of the entire generation. So why isn’t it being talked about as such? Let’s look at some of the reasons Days Gone fell under the radar for many fans and a few reasons why you should play the game immediately.
Zombie Fatigue
Fatigue exists in all aspects of life and when it comes to video games, it’s no exception. A recent style of game that has become overbearing is the open world-post apocalyptic type games. Fallout 3 is what started this fad, and it is something that developers are still trying hard to cash in on to this day. We are to the point where these games are bleeding into one another. With so much grey and brown in these games, it can be hard to tell them apart. Of course, there are excellent games that use this setting, but for every one great game, there are half a dozen mediocre ones right behind it.
Another common trope that people have grown tired of recently is the zombie game. It’s like the post-apocalyptic games but with an enemy that is hard to add any sort of variety too. During the Xbox 360 generation, it was staggering to see how many zombie games were coming out between the three major consoles and pc.
While it has slowed down this generation, zombie games are still coming out more often than people would prefer. There are still some gems that people look forward to like The Last of Us 2 and Dying Light 2, but when people hear zombies they tend to only half listen. Days Gone was a direct example of how people feel about zombie games in this day and age. While it seemed to gather plenty of excitement in the beginning with a crazy trailer in 2016, that quickly died off after a couple of pushed back release dates. With people already skeptical in the beginning due to the zombies, Days Gone was starting off on the wrong foot before it even had a concrete release date.
Lackluster Marketing
When you are tasked with marketing something to a group of people, your job is to make your product stand out among all of its contemporaries. This really is the first rule of marketing. The team behind the marketing for Days Gone seemed to take the safe approach when showing off their game to potential buyers.
When you first saw gameplay on the stage of E3, it looked pretty unique. For those who don’t remember, they showed a trailer of Deacon fighting a massive horde at a lumber mill. He took down 100’s of zombies while running through the mill, knocking piles of lumber over to slow them down, throwing firebombs at the zombies and ducking undercover that the horde had to smash to get though. It was pandemonium on a scale we haven’t seen in a zombie game since the original Dead Rising.
With the buzz around the game getting off on the right foot, it seemed difficult to screw this up. But with the trailers to follow, it seemed like Days Gone was heading in a very generic direction. They painted Deacon as some macho bilker guy that most zombie games or movies have as their main protagonist. They told people that they weren’t actually zombies but instead, they were called “Freakers”, which felt very corny. All of which lead to Days Gone struggling to differentiate itself as most Sony AAA games have done. After all, this was scheduled to release (after many delays) in early 2019, which was right after Sony’s amazing year with God of War and Spider-Man both coming out.
Initial Reception of Days Gone
Well, critics felt that their worries were vindicated. Days Gone was reviewed as an average game on most major outlets, and just average was not the norm for Sony first party releases.
The reviews attacked technical issues that the game has and a generic story that failed to take risks. While I look at this game with a lot of love, most reviews seemed pretty fair to me. The only problem was that I felt the final score didn’t represent the full context of the review very well. If you looked at the fans’ reception of the game, it seemed to be a completely different consensus that they arrived at. Whether it was on Reddit or Metacritic, the user reviews looked much more favorable than the critic reviews. So why did fans like the game so much more than critics?
What Days Gone Does Right
It feels fair to say that fans enjoyed the game more than critics because of the time period that Days Gone was released in. Days Gone has the benefit of releasing during a time where not much else came out. If you are looking at exclusives, this was it for Sony. On Microsoft’s side, there was nothing other than Crackdown 3 which was quite the letdown. For third party releases you had Resident Evil 2 in January, and Kingdom Hearts 3. Both of those games excite entirely different groups of people. Following that, you had Anthem, which everyone dislikes, and a From Software game come out in Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice. The latter being a game that has a very distinct audience that might not care much for the average game release.
Days Gone is a game that is really easy to just pick up and start playing. It doesn’t take a lot of dedication unless you are wanting to give it that extra time and care. At the core, it is just a game about killing a ton of zombies and trying to stay alive. But for those like myself who were looking to find a game to take up a bunch of time, Days Gone was an amazing experience.
Deacon St. John… Actually Pretty Lovable
As I said before, the way this game was marketed didn’t make Deacon look like a character with much depth. Once you start the game though, you see pretty early on how interesting he actually is.
His relationship with his biker buddy Boozer is a very real feeling of friendship. They are two men who at times don’t want to show how much they actually care about each other. They let their stubbornness get in the way of accepting the help that they need from their friendship. Their relationship changes so much throughout the entire game, it nearly ends at one point only to come back together in a natural way that I won’t spoil for you. Deacon and Boozer feel like real best friends. Most games can’t make this feel as natural as it does in Days Gone.
There is also Deacon’s relationship with his lost, presumably dead wife. There isn’t a lot that I can get into with this without spoiling too much, but there are a few things that are safe to point out. Sam Witwer is the man behind Deacon St. John’s voice and likeness. I had never heard of him until playing this game, but I had to figure out who voiced Deacon. The job he did was incredible and it shines the brightest when Deacon is searching for Sarah, his wife. There are times when you feel hopeless for Deacon, and times where his naïve actions cause you to think just as irrationally as he is. Deacon is one of the best acted and written for characters I have seen in any video game. It is something that should have been more talked about during this year’s Game Awards but failed to be mentioned because of the lack of critical success for Days Gone.
The Unique Gameplay
While there is no denying that Days Gone had its technical issue, it never got to the point where I couldn’t enjoy the game. I really didn’t experience any problems until I got close to the end of the game, then I would notice dramatic frame rate drops when exiting outposts. The whole time I played on a base PS4 which is worth mentioning because the game was still drop dead gorgeous at times. I only wish I could see the game in 4K.
Surprisingly enough, the game’s frame rate held up even when I was fighting off a massive horde of 100+ zombies. Speaking of which, the hordes are no joke in Days Gone. When we saw that first horde in the trailer, I’m sure some were skeptical that the PS4 was capable of rendering such a massive amount of enemies. I will say that the PS4 is absolutely capable of it. Not only did they fit that many zombies onto your screen at once, they actually act as an intelligent enemy. It will split up and try to pinch you into one spot. If you crawl under a small opening, not only will they follow you, they will break through it, go over it and go around it in order to get to you. It takes careful planning to take out a horde and a whole lot of extra gadgets and explosives if you want to clear the whole thing out.
While the zombies are an entire entity on their own, you also have to worry about human enemies as well. There are your regular bandits, as well as a few cults that have sprung up around the area. One of these cults goes by the name of The Rippers. They are a sadistic group of ladies and gentlemen that shave their heads, cut themselves all over and act like the zombies and swear off ever killing one. If someone is captured by The Rippers, they torture you until you die or join them. So they represent what would likely happen to America if a zombie outbreak occurred.
The humans give you an extra layer of enemy depth that is welcome in any zombie game really. They have outposts you can take over and various ways that they impact the main story. Human factions play a large role in the choices that Deacon and his crew end up making.
Give Days Gone a Shot
If you ever thought about it but shied away because of the review scores, I strongly recommend you give it a chance. It isn’t perfect of course, I wouldn’t even give it a 9 if I were reviewing it. The story drags on a little towards the end and there are a few technical bugs. Even with that though Days Gone ended up being my runner up for game of the year, falling right behind The Outer Worlds. It would have beat out The Outer Worlds if it just ended a few hours sooner.
Now that I am done with the main story of the game, I have a whole bunch of hordes that I still have to wipeout. I save these for when I have someone over that hasn’t played the game, and I show them just how crazy it is to fight one of those tidal waves of zombies. Someone who loves zombie games or movies should see Days Gone as a must have. For those who are fed up with zombies in pop culture, Days Gone probably isn’t for you. Although, if you are a horror fan, maybe a Walking Dead fan or just someone who loves your standard open world video game, Days Gone is something that you won’t regret jumping into.
