Gameplay

Days Gone reminds me of a mix of Far Cry, Grand Theft Auto, and Horizon Zero Dawn with zombies sprinkled on top. The game is no doubt inspired by many major open-world titles. We've seen various iterations of the zombie apocalypse setting before, and Days Gone isn't fundamentally different. You're stranded in a hostile world and have to battle it out against the undead. Unlike many other titles, the zombies in Days Gone aren't moving at a snail's pace, but can actually do serious damage unless you start running early enough.

Riding on a bike is definitely useful for that, but besides that I felt like the whole "biker gang" aspect was completely underutilized. The bike is basically your horse from other RPGs, and that's it. It's also not trivial to navigate the woods—is anyone surprised? While I didn't get stuck on foliage as often as in other games, it's still not as fluid as you want movement to be, especially once you leave the roads. What makes the whole bike gameplay even more annoying is that someone decided you have to make sure you have sufficient fuel, and the bike needs maintenance, too. While these aspects are certainly realistic, they are just timesinks that make it more tiresome to travel in the game world. The fast-travel option is nice to have and helps, but gating the fast-travel points behind zombie camps that need to be cleared feels like yet another timesink and doesn't bring much convenience. No, it's not like you can fast-travel to the camp first and then have to clear it to continue, you simply can't initiate the fast-travel process at all until you manually drive to the camp and clear it. On the other hand, I've spent hours clearing optional content in many games, so why isn't it fun in Days Gone?

I'm not sure. The whole game loop and gun play simply didn't "click" for me. It's definitely "alright," but nothing to write home about. There's a good variety of weapons, the melee combat animations are really outstanding, and there's plenty of blood. Yet some weapons aspects feel like yet another timesink—you can collect weapons, but then you can't switch between them at various weapons lockers. For weapon lockers to stock the guns you want, you have to buy them at various NPCs gated behind a faction reputation grind. Why even mark content as "optional" when it really is not.

For completionists Days Gone is awesome, though. There is so much to discover in the world, and you can just walk around, exploring things. While doing so, you'll encounter plenty of side content that's well crafted, but does get repetitive after a while. However, the story missions come with much better variety even though the storyline is fairly cookie-cutter. I liked that the story isn't completely linear and you can work on objectives in the order you prefer.

Overall, Days Gone is an alright game with a good foundation that contains lots of solid gameplay elements, but really can't excel in any category. I doubt I'll finish the game and wouldn't recommend buying it at full price even though the game offer around 30 hours of gameplay, which is a lot by today's standards.

PC Port / Tech / Graphics / Performance

On the PlayStation 4, Days Gone was notorious for its low framerates, but impressed with great graphics. The PC port looks "good" for a video game in 2021. I really like how beautiful and credible the vast landscapes of North America are rendered. If you took a look at our screenshots, you'll certainly agree, but you'd also have found a few shots which are of relatively low poly counts, mostly inside houses—more polish here would have been nice.

Cutscenes are an essential part of Days Gone, and the developer did a fantastic job here, delivering almost movie-like camera angles and action. Facial animations are outstanding, which helps bring the characters to life, and the voice acting is excellent, too.

What stood out to me technologically was the lighting algorithms, which are very impressive for a title from 2019. The dynamic lighting works well and is a refreshing change from prebaked lights everywhere, or raytracing with a massive performance hit. Still, I feel like the addition of DLSS and RT could have given Days Gone that little bit of extra oomph to make it stand out more from other 2021 game releases.

In terms of settings, Bend Studio did a great job; every important PC-specific option is present. There is no hidden FPS caps, and the game has good support for aspect ratios other than 16:9. On ultra-wide, the gameplay is fullscreen, only the cutscenes are letterboxed. You can remap the keys with ease, and graphics settings can easily be fine-tuned for your hardware's capabilities.

Optimization is quite good, almost every modern graphics card can achieve 60 FPS at 1080p. For 1440p, the requirements go up a little bit, a RX 5700 XT or RTX 2060 got you covered at that resolution. Reaching 60 FPS at 4K does require good hardware: the RTX 3070, RTX 2080 Ti and RX 6800 XT are fast enough. When comparing AMD vs. NVIDIA, NVIDIA definitely has the upper hand. The reason is that Days Gone runs on Unreal Engine with DirectX 11, a suboptimal combo for AMD Radeon graphics cards. For example, we usually see the RX 6700 XT between the RTX 3060 Ti and RTX 3070; here, it's well behind RTX 3060 Ti. The RX 6900 XT is significantly slower than the RTX 3080, a card it usually beats with ease.