I went into this game with high hopes and ignorance, but from an occasional trailer preview and some light reading, I determined long ago that the storyline felt authentic and it was being badged as an exclusive to PlayStation. Exclusivity badges seem to be for better or for worse these days, back during the PlayStation 3 it really felt like Sony had their things together.
The storyline starts out with our protagonist, Deacon St. John. He's seen helping a woman with her critical injury, and you can tell immediately off the bat you are in a post-apocalyptic world. I found it to be very familiar to any zombie based scenario and it seems like a moderately cliche start to the entertainment.
After the first chapter, a theme of being thrown into things stays evident as you appear riding your bike with a friend. No glory is built up in your trusty steed as you couldn't build or observe any relationship with the bike thus far. Although I do admit, it was fun to hop into things after a long-awaited time for some zombie slashing.
Please don't get me wrong, I'm a massive fan of anything zombies. The only thing I played for a year and a half straight a while ago was weekly Nazi zombies. Just because this is a zombie game doesn't give developers the right to skip some of the video game 101's of giving their users a steady and enlightening lesson into their tools and controls. Days Gone treats things similar to the app you just downloaded from the App Store, through push notifications. In my personal experience, the best way to win me over is to show my controls through combat scenarios and not just plain text bubbles.
Text bubbles and learning on the spot are something I'm used to though, so I put my 2 cents back into my savings account, and shut it. Once the story started to develop, I found the new world I had entered to be scary and uninviting, but in a right way, it's like the developers wanted to warn me about playing the game. The zombies are accurately frightening, and the deaths are gruesome and very bloody, they pay a lot of attention to emphasis of death as one of their recurring themes throughout this story. The Characters choke for air as blood seeps out of their organs, they show hard to watch scenes with torture and don't spear any fingers.
When killing zombies with weapons during Days Gone you'll get a sort of half baked feeling because the guns are cool, but they don't pack that extra punch that you feel when shooting a firearm in for example 'Red Dead Redemption 2," the mechanics lack any creativity with weapons. On the other hand, melee combat is so much fun, I love slashing and beating up zombies with a bat, It feels right to bash these dumb coagulated, gravy, hot dog, bun bastards heads in with melee battles.
You'll also notice that the graphics in this game are fantastic, they make for a great highlight to the terrifying world of Days Gone. A feature that I'm loving as soon as I saw it pop up as notification was the 'skip dialogue' feature during allowable character walk and talks. In most games there comes a time where you could give a rats ass about what some lowly peasant first chapter side chapter had to say, and Days Gone is one of the few games where they give you this option to skip the annoying walk and talk dialogue.
In all, I am enticed by Days Gone, I think it has definitely given me a mixed basket of emotions and opinions, but it's definitely playable and deserves a hearty play through at that. I think I'll keep my expectations to a minimum and just play the damn game.