Pretty songs
When you drive over a mountain, it can be a long haul. Much like the cinematic scenes in Red Dead Redemption 2, you can spend a lot of time riding from one part of the open world to the next. And the developers give you good, haunting ballads to listen to as you ride the open road.
What you won’t like
Lots of bugs
The critics have been harsh on Days Gone’s technical problems. The load screens are often long. But the bugs include slow frame rates on the PS4 Pro and PS4, audio sync problems where the lip movements don’t match the spoken words, clipping, pop-in images that fill out as you approach them, cars that float, Freakers that get stuck in a corner, and many other things that take you out of the experience.
In one critical moment toward the end, I couldn’t hear any dialogue. On top of that, because I had experienced hours of audio problems, I had subtitles turned on. The subtitles didn’t appear. That was one of the points where I was learning about the cause of the Freaker plague.
I encountered story bugs, too. I never got to see one of the dramatic hostage rescues because I happened to shoot the bad guy with a sniper rifle before I approached the platform. So, I didn’t get to see a whole cutscene about rescuing the mechanic, Manny.
Lousy frame rate
The frame rate inexplicably drops low in parts of the game, making you feel like you’re looking at a cartoon flip book sometimes. This game has been in the works for seven years. Its launch was delayed a couple of times, and it showed up at three Electronic Entertainment Expo shows before its launch.
I played the game and soldiered through seven different patches. I thought by now it would be polished. But it clearly could have benefited from just a little more debugging, or whatever it takes to stop you from feeling that you are playing in slow motion. As I mentioned, I put up with bugs because I was engaged with the story.
Clunky shooting
The normal weapons are pretty much trash. You only get the one-shot, one-kill sniper rifle and the heavy-duty machine gun late in the game. Once you have those, you don’t really need anything else unless you are out of ammo.
And here’s another thing. Why can’t you shoot backward when you are on the run?
When you’re riding on your motorcycle, wolves known as Runners will chase you. They’re zombie wolves that are fast enough to catch you. You can keep driving your motorcycle but shoot backward with a pistol in your hand. This is nice for fending off the wolves.
But why can’t you do this when you’re being chased by a zombie horde? The Freaks are fast. They can run maybe as fast as Deacon can when he isn’t winded. But to shoot the Freakers chasing you, you have to stop, turn around, take aim, and then shoot. You have to either run forward without knowing who is chasing you, or you turn around to make a stand and possibly face an early death.
Bike maintenance
You run out of fuel often. If you crash into something, you have to fix your bike. You have to scrounge for a can of fuel, find a working gas station, or get scrap metal to repair the bike. These tasks and advance planning are crucial to your survival. But they make you do a beeline on your missions. That means you won’t explore the great open world that Bend Studio has created. This should have been tuned better, considering the disastrous consequences of running out of fuel in a dangerous world.
I enjoyed crafting weapons, earning credits to buy new gear, and upgrading my motorcycle as if it were my baby. But I also hated living in a kind of over-starved world, where bullets were precious.
The easy way out
Some of the horde battles have easy ways out. In one case, you can use a tunnel. In another case, you can climb up on a roof where the zombies can’t get you. That makes the battles a little too easy. I would have been happy to have more napalm grenades or explosive barrels to take out a bunch of Freakers all at once. But these key salvation spots are kind of an easy crutch for what otherwise seem like impossible battles. You can see in my own video of the sawmill battle, I leaned on one of these salvation spots a lot.
An unfinished story
Even when you find out the mystery of Sarah, when you find out how to take on an entire horde and survive, you still have some loose threads. I won’t give it all away, but the main narrative ends without some resolution to a couple of the main mysteries in the game. Maybe some DLC or a sequel is coming, but Days Gone leave some major questions unanswered.
Puzzling puzzles
Puzzles are supposed to be hard. But a number of times, I was clearing out Freaker infestations. If you do this, you make the world less dangerous and you can fast travel between locations. But it takes time. You have to find hidden nests. You might uncover a half-dozen nests in a town.
Visual cues show you the direction where you can find the remaining nests. But I had to search wider and wider areas to find some of the last locations. It was annoying, and not because the puzzles were hard. It was because these were non-essential tasks when I had better things to do. It seemed like the point was to stretch out the game to make it longer.
Once, I was really annoyed to scour an entire station that belonged to NERO, the mysterious government entity, only to be stymied for the lack of a gas can. You need the gas can to turn on a generator, which has to be operational to turn on the automated doors so you can get inside. After a lot of time searching for that gas can, I wound up getting on my motorcycle and driving off.
Conclusion
The sad thing is that Days Gone has so many flaws that most critics haven’t noticed the good parts. I would guess that many chose not to finish the story. But it’s a good one. It had the potential to be as good as The Last of Us, but it lost its way. It’s worth playing, especially as Bend Studio stamps out the bugs.
Were it not for the technical problems, my rating might have been more like 90. I don’t think I’m being too punitive. Problems like lip-syncing are really disruptive to the gaming experience. The average score by critics on Metacritic is 72 out of 100, though fans have been kinder, giving the game a rating of 80.
Perhaps the game is pushing the PS4 to its limit, and it is a justification for the coming launch of the PlayStation 5 in 2020. Sony should really think about remastering this game for its future console — and stamp out those bugs.
If we want to get more of The Last of Us, it looks like we’ll have to wait for The Last of Us Part II. The game has weak shooting systems and some bad weapons, much like Red Dead Redemption II. But while the other games have been highly rated, Days Gone has had its legs cut out by the bugs.
Score 75/100
Days Gone is now available for the PlayStation 4. Sony sent us a digital code for the purposes of this review. But they sent it to the wrong email first and cost me four days of play, which is one reason this review is so late.