Now the big mother-fucker of zombie fiction is The Walking Dead. While it's not so popular now, just a few years ago people were going fucking CRAZY for that show. One of the most popular characters in that show was Daryl, a rough and tumble biker type with a lone-wolf type attitude and the kind of guy to not take no shit from nobody, no sir. So one day a bunch of stupid wankers had the brilliant idea of making a zombie survival game where all the characters were Daryl and everyone behaved like they had fallen off their motorcycles and landed on their heads one too many times.
I'm going to skip a real description of the story to this game because it's very long and very stupid but I'll do my best to give you a cliff notes version. You play as Deacon St John, the most Daryl-like of all the people in the land, and while riding around the zombie infested mountains you get jumped by a bunch of cultists and your friend, Bald-Daryl, gets his arm messed up by a blow torch. You then gotta help him out, help out a bunch of camps, kill the cultists, join the army, find your wife and then murder the army before they start an outright holy war on all the people of the land. The game ends with the army dead and nothing solved as you ride off into the sunset.
But who really gives a shit about the story when its such an obvious "the real monsters are us humans" kind of tale so what we are really here for is the game play. Well sadly, the game play is simple, generic over the shoulder 3rd person action bullshit like you've played a million times. The enemies are daft, the zombies are stupid and easy to kill and every mission is basically go somewhere and shoot shit or go somewhere and chase shit on your bike. The survival elements are non existent because the getting camp money is easy as fuck and even if for some reason your run your supplies down, almost every car, building and bush is bursting at the seams with supplies for you to craft stuff.
The games big draw, the one thing that anyone remembers from the E3 demo that they showcased that one year, is the zombie hordes. Dotted around the map are HUGE numbers of zombies that will all aggro you at once if you alert them. The problem with the hordes is that throughout my entire play through I couldn't find a reason to give a shit about them. There's a few missions throughout the campaign where you HAVE to fight a horde but outside of that you just very easily avoid them as you do all your other shit. The horde fights aren't even interesting either, you just let them chase you around and when they bunch up around something explosive you shoot it. Throw molotovs or napalm while your being chased and once the numbers thin out finish the job with your gun. It's a test of patience rather than a test of skill or preparation. A lot of hype for a non-feature.
But the absolute worst aspect of this game is the bugs, there are, SO MANY bugs in Days Gone that it's actually embarrassing. I didn't bother to update the game upon first putting the disc in and before the 28gb patch I was getting hard frame rate drops, textures not working, AI bugging out, missions not working, the whole shabang. There was one mission in particular where I had to rescue a guy from a camp. Upon arrival one guy took the guy into a back room and I had to gun my way through the other guys. What was supposed to happen is that when I killed the guys outside, I would jimmy open the door, kill the leader and rescue the dude inside. What actually happened is that the game bugged out and it would not recognize the henchmen as being dead so I would go to the door and it would just throw up a message saying "clear the area of enemies to rescue to hostage". The problem is that this was a main story mission and despite many attempts at restarting the game, reloading save files, resetting the mission the thing WOULD NOT PROGRESS at all.
That's when I caved and installed the 28gb patch that it was pestering me for on my Playstation menu and that fixed that mission bug but the game still suffered from constant broken textures, crap AI, crashes and there was one mission near the end of the game where collision with the floor just crapped out and I couldn't progress for a while AGAIN because I kept falling into the abyss under the world.
This game really is the whole package of long, tedious, broken and predictable. If you saw the E3 trailer all those years ago and were thinking about picking it up, just don't. Save your money and use it to buy something better than this such as Dying Light.
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