Phew, finally finished the story today. I'm wrapping up the post-credits quests now, and with any luck I'll have the Platinum tomorrow, depending on how many Hordes I'll have to fight to get these last five Skill Points. It's been a long ride, and after what must be at least like 60 hours I still think the game is pretty damn mediocre, but I don't regret my time with it.
I grew to really like the characters, and I particularly liked the way the game felt distinctly like a prestige TV show in terms of the way it split itself into Storylines. It's an interesting idea, and I think it paid off really well. I thought it was gimmicky to begin with, but then I realised that the percentage ticker you get as you get deeper into each storyline is a cool way of building the anticipation for the end of that quest line. Once you get to 70-80% you know you're coming up on something big, which I quite liked. I liked that the Storylines would weave in and out of one another, too. I think there's some great storytelling and character moments in here, supported by some excellent voice acting and some of the best facial animation in the business.
Buuuuut, I also think there's some thoroughly average stuff, too. I think the game is straight up bad for like the first fifteen hours, and only really hits its stride once you reach Lost Lake. I think it's pretty solidly great for a while there, but then it loses steam again at the next big transition and for me it never really picked up again. I think the nature of the open world really hurt the storytelling at certain pivotal moments, too. You'd hit a crucial part of the story and then just not come back to it for like ten hours even if you wanted to because the next mission in that Storyline wouldn't be there for you. Then suddenly you'd rush through a new Storyline that could have used more room to breathe.
Days Gone is just too damn long for its own good. Too long, too familiar, and without enough of its own to bring to the table. Fighting the Hordes can be great, but it's endgame content and it might take you 50+ hours to get there with all the upgrades and equipment you want. For those preceeding 49 hours, Days Gone is a perfectly standard open-world Bandit-Camp-'Em-Up, collecting loot to craft molotovs with and XP to work your way through a skill tree that's mostly filler. Mark the enemies, click the 'highlight loot' button, hold the button until the circle fills up. Stealth is rudimentary, gunplay is mediocre, weapons are much of a muchness, enemy AI is subpar; there are just so many other games from the last few years that do all this same stuff, and do it with more interesting gameplay concepts, art styles, themes and settings, or all of the above.
Like I said, I liked the game, and I'm still not done with it, but I still think it's every bit the 7/10 that its Metacritic suggests. I think about how it takes fifteen hours to get going and I wonder, can you really recommend a game that you straight up did not like for that many hours? To stretch the TV show analogy, it's like a show with an entire bad opening season that you just have to suffer through before you get to the good part. Or, to put it another way, can I really recommend fighting through to find the good in Days Gone in a world where The Last of Us exists, which is so similar in look, tone, setting and gameplay, and where you could spend those same 15 hours and probably finish the entire game. And, y'know, have a better time.
