Days Gone

Days Gone is a gigantic open world post-apocalyptic zombie game that feels like a mash-up between The Walking Dead and Sons of Anarchy. You play as this tough biker dude named Deacon St. John who is trying to get away from his old life and ride north along with his pal Boozer. You end up getting tangled in a bunch of storylines that vary between helping out survivor camps to killing hordes of zombies. It's a decent overall narrative that was fine for the most part, but the first 10 hours or so are painfully slow. Your main mode of transportation is a motorcycle that can be upgraded at camps while you complete various jobs around rural Oregon. I found that constantly having to keep the bike full of fuel was a little annoying, but upgrading its various parts was satisfying—riding the bike around the countryside actually felt pretty good. From there Days Gone really starts to fall apart. Most activities in the game are incredibly boring and very repetitive. There's enemy camps to take out, zombie hordes to kill, infected nests to burn, hostages to rescue, and so forth, but I didn't find any of them to be very fun. They all felt like chores, and for an open world game that's 30 to 40 hours long (yes, you read that right), everything got very grating by the end. I wanted to like Days Gone because some of its gameplay systems are pretty neat. For example, to conserve fuel on your bike, you can coast down hills rather than accelerating the entire time. All of the various storylines are listed out in a menu that tell you how far you are in each one, and they can intersect in some cool ways. But these systems never end up making the game more enjoyable to play, and it's honestly pretty difficult for me to think of anything I actually enjoyed doing. Even the nice looking visuals and good user interface are often spoiled by the inconsistent performance. It's hard for me to imagine anyone making it past the first 10-or-so hours, and it's one of the very few Sony-exclusives PlayStation games that I outright dislike.