Days Gone Review – Vroom and Sadness

This review contains minor information about the structure of the mission and the direction of the story. There are no spoilers for great narrative moments.

About 10 hours later, you are immersed in a hunting tutorial about nothing. The over-the-top libertarian character takes you out with a rifle and shows you how to follow a deer, even though you've already followed a follow-up tutorial. You are then responsible for getting more meat for yourself and your friend because your stock is depleted, something you must never do again. You do not cook and do not eat either; you can only donate meat to camps located around the map to gain a negligible amount of trust and money. After a while, even stopping to get meat from the wolves who attacked you does not seem worth it.

Like many things in Days Gone, hunting exists just to be there, an idea that is picked up and dropped at random. Unlike hunting, some of these ideas are good for the moment. But most aspects of Days Gone lack purpose. His many narrative threads flirt with meaning and interest, but never quite engage with characters whose actions and motives do not make sense. Driving a swollen motorcycle around the world and taking out nests and hordes of zombies is satisfying, like completing checklists for an open world, but in the end, you may wonder what's the point.

The first act of the game – about 20 hours – installs many narrative arcs. Two years after the initial outbreak of "Freaker", Deacon biker friends St. John and Boozer have become dinghies doing odd jobs for nearby survivor camps and remain for the most part between them. Deacon's wife, Sarah, was stabbed at the very beginning of the epidemic; Deacon lodged him in a government helicopter bound for a refugee camp to see a doctor, but when Boozer and he arrived, the camp was invaded by Freaks and Sarah apparently died. We understand that Deacon does not take good care of it. Boozer suggests going north and leaving memories, but Deacon's bike breaks down and is then looted. Some of your main goals are therefore to earn trust and obtain credit in nearby camps to rebuild your bike.

The bike is at the heart of everything you do in Days Gone. To go anywhere, including traveling fast, you need your bike, and if you want to save while you're in the world, you'd better be next. Getting off your bike is a matter of both entry and exit; you must stop far enough away from your enemies so that they do not hear you, but you must also be able to run quickly to your bike if things turn south and you have to escape. And, while you sneak past Freakers to loot items such as bandages and ammo, you must also be looking for a gasoline can and junk to keep your bike in top shape. , it breaks down or breaks down. gas, you are basically screwed. That said, gas and other loot will regenerate if you leave your workplace and stay there. Thus, you will not miss anything as long as you have time to look for it.

Initially, you work for two camps: the Copeland Plot theorists fortress and the Tucker Forced Labor Camp. Copeland has a mechanic capable of upgrading your bike, while Tucker has a well stocked weapons dealer. Your starter bike starts at about one kilometer per gallon and you can not store a gas can on your bike or your person. You must return to a camp to refuel or constantly search for gas cans on the territory of Freaker. This makes walking and activities in the open world frustrating at first; you must therefore perform many uncontrollable missions for both sides to start.

Many of these early missions consist of bonus hunting and rescue work in which you are going to a place, follow someone who uses your seemingly psychic vision of Survival Vision to highlight footprints and footprints. other clues, then kill bandits or freakers. Some of them require that you take the target alive, which often means that you pursue it by bike and shoot at the tires with your pistol. If you run out of fuel or ammo or if your bike is already weak and breaks down after a few bumpy turns, you automatically fail in these missions and you have to start again. You also accelerate with R2 and shoot with R1, which, although not horrible, is awkward and awkward.

An early scene featuring a drug thief launches a series of missions like this one that, once completed, does not affect the rest of the game, despite the initial appearances; Once you have found the stolen drugs, you have to choose which side to return them to, but this has no consequences, and the situation is completely abandoned. The only result is to get a little trust and credit with one of the camps. I chose Copeland simply because I wanted money for a better fuel tank. Many of the history missions that take place as you discover a third camp, more relevant from a narrative point of view, follow the same structures as these previous missions. But the focus on Tucker and Copeland equates precisely to hours of nothing in the grand scheme of history. Tucker's forced labor does not bite anyone, and although Tucker and Copeland do not seem to like each other, working for one camp does not affect your relationship with the other. When you arrive at the third camp, Lost Lake, Tucker and Copeland stop importing, especially because Lost Lake has both a better mechanic and better weapons.

Once you improve your bike a bit, the world opens up. Being more linked by low gas mileage and a weak arsenal, you can head further and more easily confront the enemy-controlled areas around the map. You eliminate the ambush camps by killing everyone present and eliminating Freaker infestation areas by burning all their nests. In addition to trust and credit, cleaning up an ambush camp allows you to loot, a map of the area and a new fast moving point; Destroying an area of ​​infestation allows you to move quickly around the area. Unlocking the map and neutralizing threats are satisfactory, as is the gradual reduction of clutter. You can see that your work is paying off in bike upgrades. However, there is little difference between each ambush camp and the area of ​​infestation, and they become repetitive early – especially because Deacon rises and moans about nests that smell horribly at each nest .

The real motivation to do all this is twofold. At the beginning of the game, Boozer, Deacon's best friend, is attacked by a group of Rippers, an apocalyptic cult with many strange rituals. The Rippers burn a tattoo on Boozer's arm and leave him with third-degree burns. Deacon's goal in life is to keep Boozer alive and healthy. This mainly involves finding sterile bandages and the mission in which you collect meat for him. In addition to that, however, Deacon sees a helicopter belonging to the government agency NERO, involved in the first relief efforts, flying over his head. This gives Deacon some hope that Sarah could still be alive, as he had put her on a NERO helicopter after being stabbed. So you start tracking down the NERO soldiers and scientists for further investigation.

The relationship between Deacon and Sarah prior to the epidemic gives rise to a number of backlashes, reinforced by her hope of living. These are usually clumsy cinematic scenes interspersed with short sections of slow walking while Sarah and Deacon discuss superficial topics, and they never provide a compelling reason to bring them closer together. Deacon is a biker and Sarah is a "nice girl" scientist, which is good, but "opposites attract" is not enough to make their relationship compelling. It's romantic in that Deacon has not abandoned Sarah, but the main conclusion of the flashbacks is that they are physically attracted to each other and that Deacon does not speak not his feelings.

The NERO arc is the place where things really resume. Spying on NERO's scientists consists of stealth missions insta-failure. They can be frustrating before you unlock abilities to improve your stealth skills, but the conversations you hear are legitimately interesting and answer questions that other zombie novels often overlook. For example, a scientist who studies Freaker learns by spying that they eat more than other people – they also eat plants, which means that they will not starve anytime soon (like in 28 days later). Deacon quickly contacts a NERO researcher who uses government resources to trace what might have happened to Sarah. Even if their relationship is confusing, this is a tempting mystery.

Nero's abandoned medical units and research sites contain more small details, including recorders playing fragments of scenes – a scientist studying a Freaker specimen, when a camp is invaded or just a joke between soldiers. To enter a unit, simply refill the generator, find and disable all nearby speakers so that the noise does not attract Freakers. Finding some speakers can prove a little tricky on some sites, making the moment you turn on the most exciting food and the awareness that you are more relieved. And in addition to satisfying your curiosity, you are also rewarded with the most tangible reward of an injector that improves your health, your stamina and your ability to concentrate like a bullet in the back.

As you learn more about NERO and Freakers, you'll discover new and more powerful types of Freaks, including a berserker and an all-female variant that screams to attract more Freak on your way. They do not really provide new challenges but slow you down, and they feel like an alternative to prepare for the first horde-based mission, which will take place about 40 hours later. This first mission of the horde is exhilarating: running while using tight spaces and molotovs to protect you from the horde, then eliminating hundreds of Freakers is a well-deserved victory. But this mission is followed very quickly by another, and after a short break, you still have two other Horde missions almost back to back that lead to the end of the main story. With no room to maneuver, the hordes are exhausting and you will probably have to stop everything to loot and replenish your stock of resources after each of them in order to progress.

In the end, Days Gone does not concern NERO, Sarah or the Freakers. It's about Deacon, and what he wants, that's what counts. Narrative discussions are dropped as soon as Deacon has no use for them. Copeland and Tucker matter only until Deacon arrives at a camp where stocks are better stocked. Boozer's health is only important because it's the reason for living from Deacon. Even the fascinating little details about Freakers are useless for Deacon, who cares only about Sarah – but not what Sarah wants or needs, but that her "old lady" may still be alive. Each character is seen through this lens centered on Deacon, and therefore it is two-dimensional.

Deacon is selfish and it is just boring that the game does not criticize him.

Deacon does not learn anything during the game and the story is concerned above all to validate his actions and feelings. When a character asks him to kill no one in cold blood, Deacon "proves" that murder is better than pity. As Boozer approaches Deacon to learn how to let go, Deacon discovers something new about NERO and gets even closer to his hope. Deacon also has a policy that he does not kill unarmed women, which in no way affects history and is not examined at all. There is no introspection here; Deacon is selfish and it is just boring that the game does not criticize him.

I have done a lot of things in Days Gone. I burned every Freaker nest; I've cleared all the ambush camps; I maximized my bike; I've released some optional hordes just because. Like Deacon with Sarah, I continued because I was hoping to find something, follow a thread to come up with a fascinating, satisfying or percussive conclusion. But in the end, I only had leftovers.