Days Gone has become the unlikely anchor of PlayStation 4’s early 2019. It’s occupying the same ‘big early to mid-year Sony-published exclusive’ release spot that games like God of War, Horizon: Zero Dawn, Uncharted 4 and Bloodborne have taken up in previous years, putting a lot of pressure on a game that is, no matter…
Days Gone has become the unlikely anchor of PlayStation 4’s early 2019.
It’s occupying the same ‘big early to mid-year Sony-published exclusive’ release spot that games like God of War, Horizon: Zero Dawn, Uncharted 4 and Bloodborne have taken up in previous years, putting a lot of pressure on a game that is, no matter which way you look at it, an underdog. Reception towards the game among press and the public has been somewhat flat – the initial 2016 E3 reveal came out of the gate strong with huge swarms of intelligent, vicious swarms of zombies, but nothing we’ve seen since has held up against it.
But the four-odd hours I spent with the game at a preview event in Sydney, Australia – the game’s first stop on a world tour of press previews – showed a game with real potential. It’s janky in places – more so than we’ve come to expect from a Sony published title – and I don’t see it being a Game of the Year contender, necessarily, but I developed a certain fondness for it. This is a game that swings hard, often with a huge lead pipe in hand.
“It’s a clumsy game, but it’s charming and big and increasingly engaging as it goes on”
The preview build opens with a long cutscene introducing the main character, Deacon St. John, at the outset of the global pandemic that will eventually turn millions of people into ‘freakers’, the game’s take on zombies ( in our interview senior staff animator Emmanuel Roth said that they don’t like to refer to them as zombies, but, well, they sure look, sound and act like zombies).
During this scene we briefly meet his wife, Sarah who is loaded into a medivac helicopter after being stabbed, and at the end of the cutscene the game cuts to two years later, during which she apparently died. Sarah loomed large over the demo – later I played through a flashback to their first meeting, and one mission involves visiting a memorial site Deacon has set up for her. It’s unfortunate that the most prominent woman in the game is dead before it begins properly, although I would not be surprised if there’s some sort of ‘well we never actually saw the body’ twist here (the demo does not suggest this, but I have my suspicions).
At first, it’s hard not to focus on the game’s less appealing elements. In the opening mission, after a goofy motorbike chase, I find myself tracking a human enemy using my ‘survival vision’ – the standard videogame ‘click the right stick and watch as footprints light up’ mechanic. When I strayed ever so slightly from the path the game was ferrying me down, I hit a ‘leaving the mission zone’ message that demanded I rein myself in, which is always upsetting to see in an open world game. Visually it’s decent, but not as good looking as that initial demo. After a bit of wandering and a few more cutscenes I’m introduced to the melee combat, which is cinematic but a little simple – as I learn throughout the demo, taking a few swings with your melee weapon, rolling and repeating will carry you through many encounters.
