Days Gone is here
DAYS GONE IS AN OPENWORLD ZOMBIE GAME
set in the Pacific Northwest region of the United States two years since the zombie apocalypse started. You play as Deacon St. John, a Drifter recovering from the memory of his dead wife, doing odd-jobs around the region in order to get enough supplies to head north and start a new life with his closest friend, Boozer.
Open world games aren’t usually my thing, and Days Gone doesn’t do things too differently. However, the things it does do differently help the experience in a positive way. There are no radio towers to climb or viewpoints to synchronize, but there are enemy camps to clear, Freaker nests to burn and NERO outposts to liberate. There’s crafting and gathering, but you don’t have to babysit things like hunger or thirst. Most of the maintenance you’ll be doing is relegated to the Drifter bike, your main source of transportation across the wilds of Oregon – and even then you’ll only need to keep track of its fuel and repair it when it gets damaged. The game keeps track of storylines and helpfully tells you how far you’ve progressed through them, so you don’t wind up losing track of the almost two dozen different story threads spread throughout the game.
While Days Gone has all the trappings of a survival game, I won’t exactly call it that. It’s a very actionized open world game with any survival elements either downplayed or streamlined. Bullet management is a very present issue, even though it might not seem like it at first. Against the various enemy factions, you’ll have no shortage of guns or ammunition you can swap around.
Up against Freakers, though, and the game shifts gears towards a more stealth-oriented survival experience where every bullet counts, where firing your gun could take one freaker out but alert an entire horde to where you are. Deek can craft a variety of tools and traps to make clearing hordes easier, but you’re always on the back foot against freakers simply because of the sheer number of them at any given time.