On April 25, 2019, Days Gone was released – a post-apocalyptic sandbox game and the brainchild of Bend Studio, developers of the Siphon Filter series. “Life After” can hardly be called a classic Sony exclusive, which, for the most part, are played and look equally interesting. At first.
Days Gone seems like just another AAA-class multi-platform game, where a lot of money and effort have been pumped into, but in the end they got something strange. During the passage of the game is addictive, and the opinion changes in a positive way. But the project has problems that prevent it from being on a par with other iconic Sony games. Details in the review.
Days Gone starts from the end. End of civilization. The world has been struck by a new virus, which makes people freaks – mutated creatures that feed on human flesh or their own kind, literally build nests, continue to evolve and terrorize the survivors.
Freaks are a local variant of the classic zombies, but they are alive and have retained a primitive mind. In this chaos, the main character, a biker named Deacon St. John, loses his wife. Two years later, he lives with a friend named Boozer in Oregon and periodically lets off steam and grief, chopping up the same freaks, gangs of criminals or camps of frostbitten sectarians of the Rippers who consider mutants to be gods.
Days Gone is about a man after the end of the world and people trying to survive and making mistakes. Some do not want to accept reality and live in the past, others, on the contrary, quickly forget their heritage and create new rules, while others try to find themselves and do everything to survive, but at the same time remain people. In addition to the classic doomsday scenario, a love line was unexpectedly added to the game, which is strange and unusual for a post-apocalyptic survival action game.
Sometimes it kills the fun of exciting missions and passions. And I still haven’t completed Life After, despite the fact that at the time of writing the review I played it for a week and thought twice that the main story was about to end, but the script again wagged to the side and created a new chain of events. In addition.
the game often forces you to do side quests, because suddenly the plot branches are cut off, and there is nothing left but to clear out freak nests, destroy marauder camps, shred presumptuous fanatics and find Nero organization checkpoints, where injections are stored to improve the hero’s characteristics. After a couple of three such sorties, story missions reappear.
There is only one positive moment in such a special expansion of the passage – the further you play, the more interesting it becomes. If at first the story missions looked trite and boring, so I often paid attention to side effects, then the story gradually changed, and I wanted to find out what would happen next more and more. Over time, I almost completely switched to the main quests, occasionally being distracted by small event tasks.
Another disadvantage of the local quests is that the types of main missions and side missions are mostly identical. In both cases, the protagonist plays the role of a courier-postman who runs around on “find-and-fetch” tasks and starts long conversations.
The quests mentioned above will not go anywhere, where you need to clear the nests of freaks, camps of bandits and sectarians. It will just be served as part of the main story. As a result, at the end of the game, Days Gone evokes twofold feelings: on the one hand, you get tired of it, on the other hand, you can’t and don’t want to quit, because the creators were able to captivate and want to bring the story to the end.
And now it is clear why the development of “Life after” dragged on for four years. Most likely, the developers put everything they came up with into it, without selecting the best and leaving even just normal. If they were more picky, Days Gone would be shorter and much more spectacular.
As for the gameplay itself and the combat system, Life After has skillfully crossed proven elements of other games. Copying from Far Cry, Mad Max, The Witcher 3, R2D2, Dying Light and others is immediately noticeable here. For such a large-scale project, Bend Studio clearly did not have enough experience and imagination.
so they took a little bit from everywhere: classic third-person shooting with rolls and time dilation, stealth and silent kills, close combat with limited stamina, collecting junk for crafting, hunting vision, searching for traces and rare items, survival elements with breaking weapons and running out of gas in a motorcycle, a trust system in camps and a newfangled living sandbox world.
The personal merit of Bend Studio is one thing – they reworked the disgusting zombies, gave them unusual skills and brought them down into huge flocks. The latter is a unique feature of the game, which, by the way, was given a minimum of time.
These trailer-advertised hordes of freaks are rarely seen on purpose. Usually you stumble upon them by chance and no more than a couple of three times per game. Later, a crowd of mutants will have to be killed on a mission, and this is what you need to prepare for, because just going nuts and running away.
as it was before, will not work. This task is a real test that requires concentration, luck and knowledge of all mechanics. Freaks can be simultaneously brought down from the main weapon (usually a machine gun, and later a machine gun or a rifle), thrown with Molotov cocktails, land mines, exploding fuel barrels, gas canisters, cars, and so on. All this happens on the move and looking for places to hide, quickly restore stamina and craft a new portion of “treats”.
