Days Gone New Review 2019 - GameGame

Hi everybody this is gamegame with AC g and as always it's my continuing mission to bring you reviews that aren't two minutes long or filled with sponsored bull crap and today's review is four days gone from s ie been studio and published by Sony and for many of us the tension really is palatable the only thing that many of us knew is that had zombies that aren't zombies in it had a heavy Sons of Anarchy vibe and always look like Sam Witwer was channeling the world's biggest coffee break dumped every time he showed up on screen seriously just look at this guy someone needs to give him an Easter card or something this post-apocalyptic third-person action-adventure survival horror game is out April 26 for the suggested retail price for $59.99 on the ps4 consoles and the game review code was supplied by Sony so as you guys know that means I go out and pre-order the game anyway and give it away to patrons so my hard-earned money is on the line just like yours let's see how it did shall we as always if you liked the video you know what today go out find a smaller youtuber you watch a number of videos from and make sure to subscribe to them YouTube's a weird place and they deserve support one person I can suggest is bad seed tech straight up honest hardware for the PC reviews and an awesome guy anyway my review four days gone not zombie bears trust in no one and the magic of somehow making a protagonist grumpier than Joel from the Last of Us graphics start first as a Sony first party property I would say days gone does excel and at times is completely unbelievably puzzling for example the dynamic weather is amazing with snow piling up on items and pillowing out around you to rain puddles building and changing your bike's reaction to the terrain as each day and night goes through its own weather cycle intersected by moments of brilliance like driving into each new survivor camp for the first time each offering a very unique setup and design that actually reflects the locations that they are in for example The Lost Lake location is more of a homestead bailout using a massive lake on one side has this cool defensive strategy where your Podunk little ranger station just has a single barbed wire fence that's about as efficient at keeping out bad guys as bird netting stopping an incoming ICBM I like the reflection of fiction on the gameplay here and this tracks out even to the trails and turnabout's of the land itself where motorbikes rule the day due to their ease of repair and most likely because people just think they look cool when they're riding them that's all reflected in the world itself also days gone has to be one of the most vertically impactful worlds that we've seen in a long time in open-world games maybe since horizon zero dawn but even a little bit more than that with the criss-crossing mountains on your motorbike one second to finding some incredibly high Vista to look out on and take a photo in photo mode the second it feels natural and actually real to the world itself and as somebody who actually lives in the state that this is based in I can say that some of those locations really do even if somewhat truncated when it comes to distance look well like the backyard now texture work for the most part is excellent down to the deep sewing mark son thick denim to age-old stains a weather and writing and most likely copious amounts of Bo on someone's biker coat and shirt all of them move with a nice physics implementation as well that re acts to the wind and rain sometimes they can go a bit overboard in the effects like one of the game's characters getting sick and apparently somehow leak in sweat like the rock when he's eating a muffin just pouring out of him despite that it's got very good design when it comes to the color and lighting and that engine itself makes each day look subtly different from the last especially when you go back and look at consecutive days pictures taken in the photo editor and though two days look overcast they actually looks lightly different animation wise the game is very well done especially the motorbike with you able to control it very easily despite the slightest hint of input delay that we've seen in many third-person games but nowhere near some of the worst ones and you also have a couple little tricks that you can do like sliding around corners it hopes the illusion that you drive in a Harley with dirt tires in a post-apocalyptic world wouldn't result in your instant annihilation via hitting a oak tree at200 miles per hours peaking of full stops though here is where the technical issues come into play because this games got a lot of them and this is after the third patch which is the retail patch first the game has a great deal of detail poppin from trees to ferns to cars to building's rocks boat docks and roadside locations it doesn't matter if you're playing on the ps4 or the ps4 pro the detail poppin is instantly noticeable and really hinders the overall image quality and occasionally actually some of the reactions as you're playing textures at times failed to load in or pop in as you're driving and that weirdly shaped rock in front of you is now a ramp or worse yet a ramp looking rock is now a deceptively fatal rock when you hit it at full speed this also comes with strange hits to the performance days gone is a little bit all over the place when it comes to its FPS while it's solidified a bit with the last patch the game does have some framerate problems that crop up from time to time and not just in the busier locations with a lot of vegetation also sometimes when you just careening down a lonely desert road and passing a burned-out car and the game is just like minus five FPS this Mars what's otherwise a fantastic looking landscape with a ps4 pro version using checker boarding to get to 4k and looks really clean compared to the ps4 Itself and it's slightly muddy or 1080presolution but both actually do offer an incredible amount of detail at times unfortunately that detail might be a little bit of the bitterness in the baskets here because we have some streaming issues there are times when large sections of land just will not appear at all while you're driving and suddenly it feels like you're back in the ps2 days this might also be tied into the loading issues because the game actually had a load Ian for loading screen for me where it loaded only to show deacons staring off into the sunset it's something that was making him really mad again and then fading off into another load screen where he was suddenly on his motor bike then fading off again where he was back at a different spot looking at a tree unless you do a lot of quick travel you're only gonna notice this during the cut scenes and during the initial loading screen which yes is actually very long lastly some of the characters look like someone's using them as the world's largest puppet and I don't even want to hazard a guess where the operators hand is their lips don't match the words or aren't moving enough to really enunciate like their faces are a bit frozen this is strangely something that only happens in the starting of the game or the first let's say four or five hours the later locations those NPCs don't seem to have the same problem it was very odd textures themselves on character and overall facial detail runs from excellent to just okay while particle effects fire effects and HDR if you have that support oh look pretty good in conclusion I just say there's no denying that atmospherically and especially when that lighting engine is dialed in right and the heavy use of volumetric fog in the mornings or the sunset and god ray sat night this thing can look fantastic unfortunately it is marred by performance and technical problems that really show that not every sony title seems to get the polish that we're expecting sound music and voice[Music]dig deep hold up I just want to say how sorry I am I didn't know I swear good any idea how much time I put into that bike it was a drifter bike man II know I know I'll make it up to you Is wear I put together a new one you got this piece of shit a bike this time we're gonna do sound first this is good except for one thing and I'll get to that in a second when it comes to the directional audio the processing on the sound samples and just overall environmental audio days gone really does deliver the lightning storms and the blanked out almost numb sounds that’s now falls can create or mimic perfectly here on the constant din of heavy rain is less of that slower static we hear and a lot of titles is just and is more of a series of discrete patterns here especially as you hear it hit various environmental pieces in the back ground that is all excellent sound staging as fine layering is good and overall I like the atmosphere the days gone provides but I do have to point out that there was one issue that did crop up from time to time the game did have an audio bug where especially when facing off against the hordes unfortunately the audio would break plane only main character attack sounds but also nothing else including the motorbike or the enemies or environmental sounds only a full switch out to a different game on the ps4 would fix this and I verified it with three other people playing the title as well on their systems with the last patch and they were all getting this when it comes to the gun sounds of the impact sounds they're pretty good but nothing really to write home about I would say it's still a very solid package though unfortunately there was that bug that would crop in that brings us to music welcome to a world where everything is written in the key of melancholy and I love it Moody and dark consistently on edge even the good days are depressed as hell in days gone and it reflects in the story you're being told and that music intertwines with it when zombies are nearby the TENS discord an almost John Carpenter synth that starts there's a tension and an angst there that I really do like while there are at times more classical game moments especially during the cut scenes I have to say kudos to in my head for not needing his stuff a hero moment down your throat every time there was a chance instead opting for a melodramatic and yet at the same time very melodic and satisfying soundtrack a highlight here for sure and that brings us to voice first make no mistakes em wit we are Deacon st. John is as unhinged as a protagonist as they come it's like your plane Wilford Brimley free the Quaker Oats years but after about ten years with the Merchant Marines and this dude has seen some shit in fact he's done his fair share and it takes a while to really actually get accustomed to him because the game doesn't need nor really desire to meet you halfway to explain it he's a muttering sputtering angry man at all times and in his good days he's seething one second talk to himself the next Jelen a Denham ease you wonder if only he can see the next trying to save a friend everyone else does find when it comes to the delivery of their lines my favorite being the old nemesis of Deacons who shows up a while into the story and their hatred for one another is really telling in those moments that was fantastically acted however the writing itself needs some work not the voice actors to install a feeling of reality there's a tremendous number of puns and ahhs and oohs and interrupting one another and half thoughts and one of the reasons you don't see this usually in movies or games is because it can be very hard to track when you are not in those actual conversations hell it can be hard when you're in them you actually end up suffering a little bit while you're playing this game especially at first when you start to think is there actually something wrong with how they're delivering the lines when you sit back and listen sometimes the actor is only as good as their lines and sometimes the actor elevates their lines here I would say that second is more likely to happen the material needs a little bit of work and of course that brings us to gameplay in a bit about the story as I said before you play as Deacon st. John a member of the world's smallest current biker club who's just trying to eke out a living two years after the world was slammed with a global pandemic that either killed most people outright or changed many into what are called freaker's and to be brutally honest Deacon's success rate is around the 1976 campo bay buccaneers and if you don't know how bad that is let's just say that his first move in the game is to double down on like 12 other bad moves he made prior what I liked about this is throughout the story the one element you're always gonna pick up on is that deacon isn't really flawed he's pretty much broken not the same sense as joel in the Last of Us but more like Omer in the Simpsons too many things have happened to him for him to make any good decisions anymore the dude is a walking bad decision factory just skipping through every moment trying get by with a motto that even one character in the game puts it as oh yeah you won't do this insert action until you basically have to and then you will I'm not gonna lie the story can be and feel very disjointed especially as you go back and forth in time and you see what happened prior to these events but that does bring us to the discussion about zombies are they zombies in this game well the devs say they're not they're freaks and that's fine as the overall term for them doesn't really change the fact that most part they're just mindless killing machines bent on chewing you to death at every turn with a few variations in their mix including infected animals and I'm not gonna stop one of them to argue over the terms and like many games of this kind is Deakin your job is to form various other people's jobs around the game world as you tried to keep your only living best friend alive after you almost killed him and single-handedly pissing off as many people as you can like you want to see the counter show up on a leader board somewhere as you progress through quests and sell items to the various camps and do jobs for them your trust level is raised and you can spend money to buy various weapons supplies and upgrades for your motorbike for example like the engine the exhaust frames lights fenders overall look as well as the engine itself all of those are just some kind of connected stat this coupled with the way the game world works actually really liked for instance each enemy type is more or less strong and able at different times during the day and something like snow or wind can add an incredible amount of bonuses to your stealth and ability to move around whether on foot or on the bike but also these all affect you for example rain makes the roads have about as much traction as a linoleum floor someone squirted Turkey drippings on and trying to get yourself to safety without smashing off three rocks two trees and someone's broken down outhouse while being chased by 40 bad guys adds an element of danger and I got to admit I died a couple times because of that but luckily you can upgrade your bike for a lot of people this strange mechanized relationship between John and his bike has seemed like the driving motivator for a lot of people to be interested in the title and it is your one way to escape the mindless hordes as well as travel around and I actually liked this system they make tangible changes to the way the motorbike handle that and felt as well as well as its speed and one of the first ones you can get is the fuel tank which adds a good deal more miles to your travel ability before you need gas because trust me that matters and even fast travel cost gas while you're traveling you can also damage the bike to the point of it barely being able to ride and the backfire ends up adding sounds to the world where sound can be the difference between life and lunch for a bad guy that cycle works fairly well here don't get me wrong there isn't some profound gaming mechanic to be located when it comes to the motorbike or everyone's in the game world but it keeps the tension somewhat high and does offer you a tip for tap when it comes to how you travel around the game world you can even idle on the way down hills so you're a little bit quieter or turn your headlamp off whether on foot or not when it comes to the activities I would say most start what you would expect there's various branches of different stories and you do activities in them like your original motorcycle crew your lost wife or people you found in the game world with each branching out to tell more stories as you continue on down the cycle as you continue to do events of course you can buy skills with the experience points that you get each split into three categories you would expect up close ranged and survival now these allow you to add stealthier movement help tracking give you the ability to mark enemies others will allow you to use more of the goods that you find in the game world as you peek around every corner anyway and pick up every odd loose nut and bolt or rags or cleaner to make impromptu bandages nothing in the skills list is gonna particularly be special to you but they do add tangible upgrades so nothing is wasted either there's nothing really like a +5 instead it's a whole new skill that you really get or a big adjustment to an original one that brings us to guns though and I bring up this last for a reason they just weren't amazing to me they weren't necessarily bad but un skilled the guns are acceptable with a couples kill points they're a little bit better but they really have a huge amount of punch they certainly do have a huge amount of effecting noise when it comes to your stealth though when it came down to it for longer range attacks I use the crossbow which was a stealthier attack anyway now taking down a hoard these are dynamically created as well as some that are in specific areas that requires a deft hand between lob and flaming cocktails into their faces and laying down a suppressive fire as you run for your frigg in life those moments were good but overall the gunplay is just about right in the middle also the offering of guns is pretty random which makes sense in a world like this but I found myself again sticking with that crossbow if only because you could make a poison Volt with a concoction that was apparently 50% adrenaline and 50% the rage virus from 28 days later because it would make people go mad and attack one another which always works in a pinch or even just sort of funny to watch of course none of this would matter if the AI wasn't good and actually unfortunately it's just okay you're rarely with others there are a couple escort missions but they aren't so bad when it comes to the enemy AI then you're sort of split down the center between the actual horde themselves the freaker's and normal humans and I would say that when it comes to the normal humans they do dodge a little bit but even on hard weren't really that hard to take down when it came to the Horde depending on how it ended up boiling out how in where I was in the game world that could become incredibly difficult very fast they are quick they're a little bit quicker than you when you're not running with your sprint and you only have a certain amount of stamina but I didn't mind that because I do like enemies that their AIis fairly tenacious and they were here and I got to add once again what I did liked was the more non-traditional story here with those stealth and heavy firepower moments despite all the issues the somewhat mediocre gunplay the non memorable skills actually really did like exploring the world it's days gone strongpoint even if it's just the first time there is something awesome about walking your bike down a hill head lamp off as you try to sneak by some freaker's but somehow one sees you and that horde you didn't even know was there in the first place is suddenly right there on top of you and each mission you do moves that story along pretty briskly how does all this come together though days Gaughan's world and story were to me the highlights exploring the world is very interesting I like verticality always have I loved being on that motorbike and there were some great moments and different are as in the world space that were highlights for me when it comes to the story it is told in a very odd fashion but it's an odd fashion that actually spoke to me in a way that a lot of games Hammond because they all feel like one two three four while those moments did exist here there were also some odd ones that felt like one two four five six seven three four2.5 and I actually ended up finding myself paying more attention because of that and that attention spilled out into the gameplay what does all that mean for fun factor when the game is running fine at a great time it's not exceptional when it comes to the gameplay and it's not really like a lot of first-person Sony titles I don't think it'll beany where near as lofty as those it's just not at that expected quality exploring was interesting the upgrades actually made real gameplay sense though they weren't really earth-shaking and I loved little choices you get to make example you can find somebody on the roadside and if you save them you have the ability to send them to one of the various camps knowing full well that each has their own huge negative along with the positive of well being safe and not dead very cool stuff there there's this strange intangible element that I actually think the Last of Us and days gone both share except the days gone has it less I know a lot of people who didn't really think that the Last of Us was that great of a game when it came to the gameplay but they enjoyed the story the way it was told in just the characters here not necessarily absolutely in love with the characters but I liked the way the game's story was told because it's just really weird really odd and ended up speaking to me personally and that brings us to the scores you guys know I rate games on aby weight for sale rent or never touch it again rating system this is wait fora sale and I would say that depending on your technical issues there's gonna be a lot of people who might want to actually look at this as a deep deep sale it still does look better than a lot of other titles out there especially even in 2019 because Sony knows how to produce titles and polish them but the polish here is nowhere near as high as it is in those other games that doesn't mean it actually doesn't elevate itself above others so anyway that's it for me I hope you guys liked the video if you did give it a thumbs up if you didn't give it a thumbs down maybe check out reddit or Twitter or Facebook and you can always become a patron on a mine on the patreon website which allows me to continue to give you guys reviews that aren't two minutes long or filled with sponsored bull crap and as you guys know even if I get a developer code for review I still buy the game and give it away peace out and enjoy the rest of your week.