An ambitious zombie game with poor execution

Days Gone seems like an accurate reflection of how things would go after an actual, IRL zombie apocalypse: clumsy, violent, and filled with failure.

Bend Studio’s new PlayStation 4 release is a survival-action game with a story that sits in the Venn diagram overlap between Sons of Anarchy and The Walking Dead. For a great many hours, you manage ever-dwindling resources, kill lots of things (both living and undead), and try not to drown in all the melodrama.

Don’t underestimate that last point. Your post-apocalyptic road trip as biker dude Deacon St. John runneth over with on-the-nose metaphors, emotionally manipulative twists, and character motivations that seem driven more by the needs of the moment than any coherent arc. 

It’s like that right from the start. Deacon lost his wife, Sarah, in the early days of the Freaker outbreak — “Freaker” is what we call the infected “zombies” in this world. She was badly injured in an accident, and Deacon had to choose between boarding the evac chopper with her or helping his injured and otherwise-doomed motorcycle club brother Boozer escape to safety.

Why is that a choice, though? The near-capacity helicopter could only take two passengers, and two of our three close-knit characters here are injured. That’s not difficult math, even in a stressful situation. And yet. 

Days Gone goes extra at every opportunity. It’s used to turn your stomach, like the time the camera lingers for so many unnecessary, painful seconds on a blowtorch pressed against Boozer’s arm. It fires up your political brain, weirdly, with incessant radio interludes from the conspiracy-toting libertarian who runs a local camp.

The so-very-extra approach even goes as far as using that lowest-hanging fruit of emotional manipulation — a cute dog — to make you feel. Yes, there is a very brutal dog death moment in this game. It’s an offscreen mercy strangling, and it is entirely unearned and so overt that it just made me angry at the game.

At times it feels like Bend is trying to use the story to say something about faith, flawed leaders, and individual judgment. But the commitment to going over the top is so pervasive, it’s hard to tell what’s serious and what’s another heaping spoonful of melodrama.

If there’s anything that sells it, it’s Deacon. Sam Witwer provides his voice, and it’s a surprisingly effective (and at times affecting) performance. There’s a very narrow line to tow between Deacon’s innate humanity and his general awfulness, and Witwer miraculously manages to find that line and stick to it.

None of the story issues would matter as much if the gameplay delivered more than it does. Days Gone tries very hard to rethink what a zombie apocalypse simulator can look and feel like. Rather than presenting Freakers as a mindless tidal wave of violent meat parts, it places them in what at first feels like living world.

Early on, you discover that infestation zones — areas where Freakers have laid down nests — block your ability to fast-travel from place to place. Burn up the nests and you’re free to fast-travel along that route at will (fuel permitting — you’ve got to keep your bike filled up). Such a cool idea!

Days Gone tries to rethink what a zombie world simulator can look and feel like.

Unfortunately, it never goes further than that. Infestation zones are one-time challenges. Clear out a set of nests and they’re gone forever. There’s nothing wrong with that from a gameplay perspective, but it undermines the story’s emphasis on the Freakers as an enduring threat.

Burning nests is one of a handful of activities you tackle as the story unfolds. There are camps filled with piratical “marauders” to take over, abandoned mobile research units that need their power restored, bounties to track, and hostages to rescue. Often, you’ll have to use Deacon’s tracking ability — click the thumbstick, see hidden or otherwise non-obvious stuff — to find your way.

Story missions are generally longer and feature twists on all of these basic activities, but they generally operate under the same rules. There aren’t many set pieces to speak of until the latest stages of the game. The beautiful Pacific Northwest setting keeps it from getting too dull, with the changing terrain forcing you to think differently about how you approach a given challenge. But Days Gone wants for more variety.

You do eventually get to take on Freaker hordes, though not until the late hours of the story. These activities are exactly what they sound like: hundreds and hundreds of Freakers that need to be slowly, methodically whittled down until they’re all gone. Unfortunately, it’s not the satisfying payoff that it could be.

In theory, horde fights have you scouting out a location and setting a bunch of traps. Once that’s done, you get the horde’s attention and have it follow you along whatever path of carnage you’ve laid out. In practice, however, that concept is undone by a number of factors.

For one, while the horde’s exact position can change, the bulk of those Freakers will always be right in the area where you need to be scouting around and setting traps. The moment you tip off one, the rest come running quickly. Deacon’s binoculars can give you a good overview of the landscape ahead of time, but getting in close to execute on a plan is often impossible without alerting the horde.

The controls are also a problem. Some environmental traps can be triggered with a single button while you’re on the run, but most of the tools in your inventory need to be selected from a pop-up radial menu (time slows down while it’s open, thankfully) and then manually deployed — which you can’t really do while running.

See, hordes move very fast. Unless you’re sprinting — which drains a stamina meter — they’re right on your heels at all times. The game seems to cheat a bit too, so if you create distance by sprinting and then revert to a normal-paced run, the horde will be allowed catch up until it’s immediately behind you once again.

Now, couple that with the fact that there’s no way to deploy a trap or use a throwing weapon without stopping or turning around. I’ve lost count of how many times I wished Deacon could just chuck a molotov cocktail over his shoulder or drop a remote bomb at his feet while he’s on the run.

That really gets to the heart of one of the biggest problems in Days Gone: Too often, there’s a massive divide between what you want to do and logically think you should be able to do, versus what you actually can do.

Resource management, that old zombie survival game standby, is also a complicating factor. Your most powerful traps and Freaker-killing tools require lots of scavenging. You can buy guns and ammo from settlement merchants, but things like molotov cocktails and attractor bombs need to be crafted. That, in turn, involves a whole lot of traipsing around at random.

Some of it makes real world sense. If you need fuel for your bike, for example, looking for gas stations or generator-powered research camps is your best bet. Medkits are always found in ambulances. Ammo’s in police cars. But when you need growlers, rags, styrofoam, and kerosene for your napalm molotovs? Good luck. No, seriously. Luck is exactly what you’ll need.

So what’s the verdict in the end? Is Days Gone a shitshow of epic proportions, a game so bad that no one should ever play it? No, not at all. The story is engrossing in its own, soap opera-y way, the world is a cool space for exploration, and the hordes — while kind of broken and not really worth the build-up — have their exciting moments. This game will find its fans, and those fans will defend it heartily.

But none of that erases the underlying problems. Bend Studio can and assuredly will patch out the many technical issues that sprang up during my review playthrough, but that can’t fix the flawed execution of ideas. Days Gone is a great “road movie”-style story about the zombie apocalypse in theory, but your mileage may vary.