Invited by Sony we tried it in preview Days Gone, title Bend Studio out on April 26 that wants to try to affirm his personal interpretation of the zombie theme. After trying it almost a year ago, we are therefore back to play the role of Deacon in a more thorough and substantial way.
During the three hours in the company of Days Gone we were finally able to understand more about the real potential of the title, which hides more than one interesting idea but which in most of the choices made by the developers is still rather lame. The first aspect that immediately leaps to the eyes (and also the most positive) as soon as the game starts is the very strong narrative imprint that Days Gone wants to show: the plot, the emotions of the characters, the scenic power of some moments are all enhanced in the title precisely because the will is to tell a story that can show different facets and not to stick to a simple track such as "survival at all costs". The infestation due to a virus, the desolation of the world, the danger of the hordes of zombies, the hard life of the survivors and the private life of Deacon will all come together to form a narrative plot that during our trial has more than satisfied us. The narrative ideas glimpsed in our test intrigued us and to date this is the best side of Days Gone that we have been able to see.
On the gameplay side, the title instead oscillates between the highs of some good ideas and different lows of not exactly good choices. The component of third-person shooting, for example, is well done with weapons that have given us a good feeling, varied between the different types of weapons with even the implementation of physics for arrows. The melee combat also satisfied us, with a good variety of animations for the different weapons available and a decent reproduction of the animations during the final elimination. Unfortunately, we cannot define ourselves as satisfied with the survival component: there is no need to look for materials around the map, crafting is useless and practically non-existent and to close the circle is added a menu for the selection of weapons, objects and terribly unintuitive and sometimes frustrating crafting. These three elements - shooting, melee combat and survival component - are also the center of the skill tree adopted in-game: you can customize some elements of the gameplay by spending the skill points earned by performing actions in the game to unlock new skills such as slowing down time during the game. aiming, or lengthening the number of melee shots that can be executed. Always on the gameplay side, it should be emphasized how the management of stamina will play a fundamental role precisely because choosing how to consume it could save your life from a chance encounter with a horde of zombies or from a clash with multiple rebels.
The last gameplay element to be analyzed is Deacon's bike. As shown over and over again, the world of Days Gone will be fully explorable aboard your motorcycle. It will need to be repaired, refueled and improved in components. Unfortunately, however, the bike seemed to us to be really problematic in the guide, with unresponsive controls and drifting difficult to manage, a nuisance that unfortunately definitely undermines the entire exploration component of the open world. We would like to focus on this aspect: the Days Gone Open World seemed really bare to us, and we are not talking about the representation of a desolate and ruined world, we are talking about the feeling that even in the advanced stages of the game (we tried those too) it offers few ideas for interaction with the surrounding environment both in terms of "consumables" and in terms of available missions or events. Even from a technical point of view Days Gone proves to be a bit limping, with inspired landscapes and very expressive facial animations, but at the same time also not very refined textures and not too convincing body animations. To underline instead the excellent audio proposal with very inspired sounds and music able to emphasize the most important moments.
Our test of Days Gone left a bad taste in our mouth, like an excellent dish of carbonara to the extraordinary sight, but which in the test of taste proves to have pancetta and not bacon among its ingredients. While the excellent narrative component makes us really curious about the adventure conceived by Bend Studio, it is some gameplay choices and some technical aspects that make us be very cautious with expectations. About a month separates us from the release of Days Gone and only then will we be able to issue our final judgment.
► Days Gone is an Adventure-Survival game developed by Bend Studio and published by Sony for PlayStation 4, the video game was released on 26/04/2019
Days Gone is a beautiful game that cannot be missing from your collection: we have decided to evaluate it with a 78%, if you are interested in learning more you can read the Days Gone Review
