What would you do if there was an apocalypse and everything you know in your life was wiped out? Many entertainment products such as films, comics, books and video games, have always imagined a similar future, capable of destroying all the bases built in centuries of society due, often, to an infection capable of making humans hungry creatures. of meat. Days Gone it takes the same stylistic features and builds a new story on it: but will it be able to stand out from other productions?
The consequences of the end of the world
In Days Gone you will check Deacon St. John, motorcyclist who will find himself thrown into the end of the world, caused by an inexplicable epidemic that has transformed many humans into horrible creatures called furious, capable of biting the flesh from their victims and sprinting towards the few survivors. The first thing that Days Gone manages to do, unlike many other productions, is to tell a world that has evolved and transformed due to this epidemic: the few remaining humans take refuge inside camps, and work for grow food to eat for to survive. The so-called bounce between these camps Stray, people who have chosen to lead a life of solitude, separating from any encampment and wandering far and wide as bounty hunters, crossing (often with their own motorcycles) the nightmare, or the streets populated by the furious. As it is repeated several times, during a similar apocalypse those who survive are certainly not good people: for this reason, groups of criminal and by psychopaths (with the skin marked by the blowtorch) called Repugnant.
The setting that Days Gone proposes to the player it is likely: SIE Bend Studio he abandons the idea of the spotless hero with incredible deeds capable of going against everything and everyone, and instead approaches a protagonist with his problems and his troubles. The plot of Days Gone, building on solid foundations made of a world that is decidedly more contextualized than the other productions, unfolds on several layers: the game offers the possibility to follow one's primary missions, as well as secondary ones, in a fairly linear way ( even if you will often have to move around the large game map anyway). And here it is then Deacon he will find himself helping the various camps, cleaning the streets from furious and criminals, collecting bounties, but above all find answers to what completely destroyed his life.
The game, fully voiced in Spanish, has therefore a very solid storyline, something rare in open world titles like this one. Precisely this will be the real push that will lead the player to want to advance, to find out how things will evolve: if this can be decidedly interesting in the main missions, there will be some series of equally interesting secondary missions, and above all capable of empathizing with the other secondary characters, each moved by a more or less valid motivation.
The engine of the game
Days Gone fuses an open world classic with a survival, where it becomes vital to manage one's resources to be able to survive: Deacon St. John may have three ranged weapons (a shotgun, a pistol and a special weapon) and a melee weapon. As you progress through the game, you can get your hands on more and more powerful weapons, increasing your chances of survival. Deacon will be able to collect, looking around among rubble, cars and old furniture, wreckage e healing material: if the latter will be used to build bandages to heal your wounds, the debris will be vital for many things, such as upgrading melee weapons and repairing any damage caused to the motorcycle or to the weapons themselves. For everything else, the game system will lead you to have to manage reputation level and money within the various camps: each of these will sell more and more material (each will specialize in something like motorcycle upgrades, purchase of weapons, etc.) depending on how much trust you have built up (which can be increased by completing missions for them and selling them food) and in exchange for a coin that we will acquire by completing assignments.
Deacon will spend most of the time around on his bike, a custom that you can boost up progressing in the game: this will allow you to increase values such as speed, noise, suspension and so on. The bike will be damaged (and you will have to use the scrap to repair it) and it will also wear out fuel (which you can find in the tanks or in the stations), becoming a real playmate.
The true soul of the title, however, undoubtedly remain the great infection and the furious, ravenous and dangerous creatures: even if they will often be found scattered in the map, sometimes it will be possible to find real ones order of these beings, who once teased will start running after you en masse, making your survival difficult. These beings will often be around at night, while during the day they will mostly hole up in lairs (often caves). Days Gone's choice is to focus on quantity and not on detail: there will hardly be powerful enemies to kill, instead replaced by wild piles of furious who can make your life hell.
In Days Gone mission management will be combined with that of the game map: there will be locations to clean up, laboratories to find and free in order to find upgrades and even random missions that will appear as a blue question mark (but you can rest assured, there will be the fast travel). Just the upgrades will serve to improve the vitality, force (useful for shooting and somersaulting) and the concentration (to slow down time while aiming). These will be joined by skills, divided into ranged weapons, melee weapons and survival, unlockable by leveling up (accumulating experience).
All the various missions will often fall into shootings: the gunplay of the game is decidedly well structured, abandoning the classic system of covers in favor of a more fluid movement and therefore the possibility of managing these firefights as you see fit.
The atmosphere of the game is one of the most successful things of all Days Gone: the fusion of psychological elements such as the characterizations of the characters and the game dynamics, not too innovative but well oiled, make the title very immersive. This is further accentuated by well-elaborated cutscenes, administered within the game especially between missions, evolving both the protagonist's status quo and his relationship with the various characters.
