Days Gone Review | Freaks & Deeks

There’s been a lot of discussion within the PlayStation community about how similar a lot of first-party games have been. They’re usually third-person single-player games that tell either a revenge story or revolve around a character finding someone in a vast open world. These are obviously generalizations to set the stage, but this topic as a whole was at the top of my mind as I booted up Days Gone, the 2019 post-apocalyptic survival game from Bend Studio. This marked the first new IP from the developer since Syphon Filter and was the first original game after back-to-back PlayStation spin-off games for the Vita: Resistance: Retribution and Uncharted: Golden Abyss.

Days Gone came out two years after Horizon: Zero Dawn, the critically acclaimed open-world RPG from Guerrilla Games, and one year before the highly anticipated The Last of Us: Part II from Naughty Dog. It can be easy to look at Days Gone and see it as a mash-up of the two surrounding franchises. And I do think it’s that release timing that made the game slip past a lot of people’s radar undetected. Though to say that it underperformed entirely wouldn’t be true either. There’s a lot to discuss about Days Gone, and after roughly 50 hours of surviving the wasteland of Oregon, I have a lot to say too. Both in terms of the game itself and how it fits into the PlayStation exclusive lineup overall. So let’s get into it.

To be honest, Days Gone is a bit underwhelming in the beginning. The game opens on a scene of our protagonist, Deacon St John, putting his wife on an evac chopper as the world is ending and promising that he’ll find her. A short title drop and two-year time jump later, Deacon is a drifter with loyalties only to his bike and his MC brother, Boozer. What’s weird is that the opening cutscene is replayed as part of a lengthier sequence just a few hours into the journey, which dampens the impact and makes you wonder if the short teaser was really that worthy of a cold open to the game. This early pacing might drive some players away, but interesting characters and smooth gameplay do a lot to retain your attention. Committing to playing through Days Gone is like sitting down to watch a new TV show. With an average runtime of 35 hours, it’s no short trek.

Narrative threads are established that might not be brought back for a dozen hours, and character moments set up moral disparities that are meaningful to dwell on. While I enjoyed the gameplay of Days Gone (as I’ll get to), there were certainly portions where I just wanted to see what happened next in the story. The game uses its characters to explore a lot of consequential themes regarding the post-apocalypse. Each camp leader holds their own set of beliefs, with some going directly at odds with others. These lead to some intriguing conversations that make you question not just Deacon’s past but your own actions throughout the game. And take Deacon, for example. Made from a team out of Oregon, the game isn’t just about the end of the world. It’s about the end of the world in America. So it puts a biker, the symbol for American freedom and the open road, at the heart of the story. And throughout the game, there are moments of modern political discourse thrown in that satirize, a little too accurately, what would happen just a few years after the game’s initial release.

Bringing that macho biker to life is Sam Witwer, who is fantastic in the role of Deacon St John. He’s gruff and tough, as to be expected, but he’s also surprisingly endearing. He’s a rather quippy character, constantly muttering things to himself, but Sam’s performance makes it less tiring. (Though you still will hear the same character interjections over and over again.) I’ll also say that most of the core voice cast is great, delivering performances with both their voice and their motion capture that add a lot of personality to their characters. Paired with mostly solid writing, there were a number of story beats that hit home for me, including some that even made me react audibly alone in my room as I watched.

My only real criticisms in terms of dialogue exchanges pertain to the survivor encounters, which are poorly delivered and half-heartedly animated, and the game’s overuse of character interactions. As you’re running through populated areas, NPCs will greet you constantly with dialogue. These are meant to make camps feel more lively and dynamic, but they don’t always match the situation. Like, what do you mean, “Deek, long time no see,” you just hollered to me as I walked by five minutes ago. I appreciate the intention of these exchanges, and on occasion, they can be rather insightful; however, they are used way too often for how many times you’ll be running past them in camps.

Once the game gets going, there is a meaty story to get through. Not knowing that you’re in for the long haul means you might fall for one of the three (by my count) fake-out endings that seem to build toward a climactic crescendo, only to continue on for another 10 to 20 hours. Personally, while I liked a lot of the ride, I wasn’t in love with the ending. The game tackles a lot of thematic elements regarding being human, living with purpose, and the end of the world, and I felt a more definitive ending would have made the payoff feel more satisfying. Without any spoilers, Days Gone ends on a rather underwhelming note, which might be a result of the open-world design. After credits, you don’t just return to the main menu or load back before the ending like Breath of the Wild. Instead, the next day comes, and you are set free in the open world to tie up loose ends. Which includes three “post-credit” cutscenes, the last of which has a “Thanos at the end of Avengers” level teaser for a sequel we now know isn’t on the way.

I can’t quite move on from talking about the narrative without mentioning how it is presented. The cutscenes in Days Gone play out like short little vignettes. They fade in and out of black with every scene and don’t follow cinematic guidelines like starting on wideshots and cutting in close. Because of this, the walk-and-talk sequences feel much more natural. There are certainly a lot of cutscenes, but a fair amount of dialogue is delivered in radio transmissions or conversations during gameplay. These sequences deliver some of the most meaningful story beats in the game, and one particular moment set to the tune of “Soldier’s Eyes” by Jack Savoretti is a standout that stayed on my mind long after it passed.

A majority of your time in Farewell, Oregon, will be spent surviving the wilderness as you hunt bounties and run errands. In the wild, both humans and Freakers are out to kill you, and things can go south very fast with snipers in trees waiting to ambush you and hordes ready to overwhelm you when you least expect it. I played the PlayStation 4 version of Days Gone on a base PlayStation 4, and barring occasional frame drops and a few hiccups, the minute-to-minute gameplay was smooth. There are a variety of weapons and items you can add to your arsenal, from military rifles and crossbows to rocks and health cocktails. These are all managed through the easy-to-access and responsive L1 item wheel.

There are enough options to suit any given playstyle, whether you want to take out your target from afar or get up close and personal for a stealth takedown. That said, despite the options, most players will likely find the loadout that they feel comfortable with and stick with it for the majority of the game. For me, I had a shotgun as my primary, a pistol (often with a silencer attached) as my secondary, and a military sniper as my special. Ammo for your weapons can be looted or purchased, but items like Molotovs and pipe bombs can be crafted in the item wheel with more crafting recipes added as you play. In the pursuit of “realism,” the gunplay is made to be more difficult. Crosshairs are wide and go wider after each shot as Deacon steadies his aim. Paired with scarce ammo reserves, this pushed me to alternate my offensive maneuvers, resulting in close calls and fights that looked choreographed.

Engaging in combat is one-half of survival. The other is in the mechanics. You don’t have to worry about feeding or hydrating Deacon, but you can still pick up scraps and spare parts for crafting, and harvest plants and collect animal meat to sell at camps. These camps are crucial to Deacon’s survival as they not only house the major characters but also have valuable resources that can only be purchased by building up trust and collecting credits. Complete jobs and clear the area of Freaks and marauders to gain trust. The more a camp trusts you, the better the weapons and bike upgrades you can purchase from them.

Deacon St John also has his own upgrades that can be unlocked with points gained from leveling up. There are three skill trees in Days Gone: Melee, Ranged, and Survival. These are tiered lists of skills that can buff anything from ranged weapon damage to the number of resources you harvest. Deacon levels up at a consistent rate, even in the late game, and the choices I made for my upgrades felt relevant to my playstyle. I didn’t use the crossbow, so I didn’t waste my points on those skills, opting to enhance my stealth. Those skills, paired with the right stat boosters from deserted NERO sites around the map, made my Deacon an optimized stealth killing machine. And that only made it more fun to play.

In some ways, the gameplay loop of Days Gone is comparable to the Far Cry series; an open world with a checklist of things to clear. If that works for you, like it does for me, then the 35-hour estimated playtime will be much higher. I didn’t mind getting distracted in the game because I enjoyed playing it. Approaching a camp and trying to quietly take down all the mauraders was always a fun challenge. Heading into an infected zone to clear out nests was a risky endeavor that I willingly sought out. On top of that, the game also rewards your actions, with everything building toward camp trust and credits. This loop worked so well for me that I rarely fast-traveled despite having the option to do so fairly early on.

I suppose now is the most opportune time to talk about the other main character of Days Gone: the bike! Similar to the Magnum Opus from Mad Max, Deacon’s bike in Days Gone is his partner for the entire ride, and you can customize it for both form and function. At camps, you can purchase upgrade parts that give the bike a bigger gas tank and make it more durable. Colors and decals can also be changed to have the bike reflect your own aesthetics. The game is designed to make you care about your bike. Its gas level dictates how far you can travel. Besides a bed, it’s the only place you can save. When facing a horde, your bike is often your only ticket out alive. And being reckless and damaging it will cost you precious scrap or camp credits. It’s also a nice touch that the first thing you see on the main menu when you boot up the game is your bike as you last left it.

To add to the note on fast travel, I do also want to mention how it works because, unlike its implementation in most games, in Days Gone, fast travel consumes gas. This means fast traveling is similar to manual travel in that you need to plan out your route. If you fast-travel to a location and get a nearly empty tank, you’ll be running around on foot looking for gas, and that can be dangerous.

If yelling “oh” and “no” at the screen marks the peak of my engagement with the game’s narrative, then clutching the controller with my heart racing as I escape from a horde is when Days Gone’s gameplay is at its most engaging. As I described to my wife, engaging a horde in Days Gone is like taking on World War Z number of zombies with the ammo reserve of The Last of Us. Dealing with a horde is always a nerve-racking experience with equal parts tension and panic. While the wandering Freakers aren’t much different than typical zombies, it’s the hordes that set Days Gone apart. And running it on a base PS4 with no big hit to performance is impressive.

The unfortunate reality of the hordes, however, is that they aren’t integrated into the plot until the last act. I spent most of the first twenty hours of the game avoiding the hordes in the open world because they were so daunting. I challenged myself to take one down in the second act when I stumbled into a nest, and that’s when I realized how great those encounters were. The moments when I hid in a bathroom as a horde wandered by outside or ran to my bike with the stamina bar nearly depleted are like BPM bookmarks in my journey. But if you’re sticking with the main story, going from quest to quest, you won’t get to experience the best of Days Gone until the last few hours when the game requires you to face them.

Since Days Gone is classified as an open-world survival game, let’s get into that open-world part of it next. Farewell is based around Bend, Oregon, where Bend Studio is located. The benefit of this location is that it makes for a diverse playground. Assuming your bike has the gas for it, you can drive from the thick forests of North Farewell around the lakes out west down to the snowy mountains in the south. The map is littered with a few camps to do runs for and abandoned towns to explore. Tucked into the nooks and crevices of the Oregon mountains are encampments to clear, bunkers to find, and nests to burn out. You can explore these points of interest at your leisure, and the story does a decent job of pointing you in different directions.

The map is large and varied enough to feel distinct as you’re biking around, but not so vast that you get lost. Though one feature I did wish for while I played was better route guidance. At a certain point, the routes from camp to camp will get etched in your mind, but for the majority of the game, you’ll need to rely on the mini-map in the corner of the screen to figure out where to go. I do like the convenience of the mini-map and the way that it has a built-in proximity indicator for enemies. However, if there were a visible route marker on the road (or even something like Mafia‘s street signs), I wouldn’t have to constantly take my eyes off the path as I rode around.

Which brings us to the final big point of the review. Days Gone is a good-looking game. As I said, I played the game on a base PS4 with HDR turned on, and I felt that the game was always good to great looking. Special mention goes to the facial animations, which show a lot of detail in the eyes and give meaning to the silent moments where characters seem reluctant to say what they feel. Farewell can also be quite a sight with rain, fog, and snow changing the atmosphere dynamically as you play. By the way, the snow in Days Gone looks amazing, and seeing it accumulate in real time once it starts to fall until it covers everything in a layer of shimmering white never got old. The same goes for the detail of the bike’s headlights hitting the grass growing in the cracks on the pavement as you drive at night. These all add up to really enhance the experience.

Now, let’s take a step back to talk about the PlayStation first-party selection. I do think there is some validity to the claim that there’s a shared DNA between the big AAA PlayStation releases. This could be a byproduct of a collaborative ecosystem among the studios; after all, it’s no secret that Guerrilla Games helped Kojima Productions on the development of Death Stranding or that Bungie gave feedback on other PlayStation live-service games. But I think the more important point here is that not every game is made for everyone. I mean, sure, they try to cast the widest net possible to get people interested, and numbers are the name of the game, but just because you loved God of War: Ragnarok, doesn’t mean that Housemarque’s Returnal will be up your alley.

Case and point, earlier this year, I started Horizon: Zero Dawn. At a fundamental level, I can appreciate the game’s visuals and technical design, but as someone who isn’t in love with its narrative blend of sci-fi and fantasy, I wasn’t compelled to return to it often and, eventually, just shelved it. Meanwhile, I am much more interested in the post-apocalyptic genre. Fallout 3 and The Last of Us are two of my favorite games, and I even directed a post-apocalyptic short film called What Remains. (You can watch it now on YouTube.) So once the ball started rolling in Days Gone, it was hard for me to put it down. And many of the themes it discusses echoed in my mind even when I wasn’t playing.

Like I said, it is still a numbers game at the end of the day, so let’s look at them. If you’re a fan of Days Gone, like me, it’s disheartening to hear that Bend Studio’s pitch for a sequel was shut down by Sony. Now that can’t be entirely just because of sales numbers, because Days Gone wasn’t a bomb. The game went on to sell over 9 million units across PlayStation 4 and PC, which is comparable, to a point, with Ghost of Tsushima. Looking just at PlayStation 4 sales, Days Gone is in the top 20 with 7.32 million copies sold, beating out 2016’s Ratchet & Clank and inFamous: Second Son.

So what went wrong? Well, I think there are two main factors at play. The first is the aforementioned design similarities that the game has with other first-party PlayStation games. I’ve already touched on why that isn’t a big deal for me, but it was the prevailing sentiment among gamers at the time of the game’s release. The other point has to do with the public interest in zombies. (And yes, that includes Freakers.) By 2018, zombies didn’t have the same popularity as they did in the late 2000s and early 2010s, after Dawn of the Dead was rebooted and before The Walking Dead went off the rails. The Days Gone release date might have fit nicely into PlayStation’s release calendar, but after 6 years of development, Bend’s game went out to a fatigued crowd.

I think those two points, along with some of the other criticisms I had with the game, brought the game’s score down. With a 71 on Metacritic, Days Gone didn’t review terribly, though it does stand out in a lineup of critically acclaimed titles such as God of War, Marvel’s Spider-Man, and The Last of Us. Although you can never rule out “lazy reviewers who didn’t play the game” and “woke gamers who didn’t like a guy checking out his date’s ass” as reasons either, I suppose. That last part is a reference to comments made by the game’s Creative Director and Lead Writer, John Garvin. What sucks about these hair-brained claims is that they muddy the discourse around a game, making it difficult to have honest, critical conversations.

If you couldn’t tell by now, Days Gone is a great game, and I really enjoyed my time with it. That’s not to say it’s perfect. Even in 2025, the PS4 version of the game still has some performance issues. It’s a lengthy game with odd pacing that builds toward a climax twice before actually ending on its most predictable note. However, if I can use an all too apt metaphor, in Days Gone, it’s not about the destination, it’s about the journey. If you’re a fan of post-apocalyptic stories or survival games, don’t let the weird discourse around the game drive you away. Over the game’s 30 to 50 hour run time is a fun gameplay loop set in a gorgeous world filled with endearing characters and terrifying hordes. Days Gone is available on PlayStation 4 and PC. The Remastered version came out earlier this year for the PlayStation 5.