Days Gone is about to get a new major upgrade with a remastered version that includes hundreds of improvements, new DLC, modes, and many bug fixes, making it the right time to review one of the world’s best games.
Instead of getting a sequel or a prequel, Days Gone is about to get a remastered version. The game originally came out for PlayStation 4 back in 2019, and the PC version was released two years later, in 2021.
Although I really wanted to play the game, it got so many mixed reviews on Steam because of all of the bugs and performance issues, which Bend Studio quickly fixed by releasing new updates.
I thought that giving the developers more time to improve the title was the smartest idea – as it usually is – and now that it’s more stable, I gave it a try.
The story in Days Gone
Now, what you need to know about Days Gone is that the game is set in a post-apocalyptic world, and more specifically, in Oregon.
You play as Deacon St. John, and the game starts by showing what was happening when the global pandemic started – which includes your wife, Sarah, getting stabbed by a Freaker (zombie) kid, and to save her, you had to let her take the rescue helicopter.
Unfortunately, there wasn’t enough room for three people, and having your friend, Boozer, having a cutted leg, you decided to stay with him and find your wife in the resque camp.
A few minutes later, the game takes you into the future, 2 years after the events. You’re now a former outlaw and a bounty hunter who travels through the scary and dangerous Pacific Northwest with your bike, searching for your lost wife.
During the gameplay, you’ll learn more about how those two met, how they got married, and the problems they were facing before the pandemic.
But finding your lost wife isn’t your biggest problem. The Freakers and human enemies are all over this destroyed world, and while you’d think that Freakers are the only ones looking to eat you, wait until you meet the canibals known as Rippers.
Marauders and Bandits are also some of the brutal human enemies that you’ll be facing, and they’ll attack you each time they find a chance to kill you and steal your supplies – doing everything that they can to survive. Some of the enemies require you to use stealth techniques, while others don’t give you that chance.
The gameplay and Bend Studio’s environment
The game is more or like watching a movie and getting hooked on the story from the very beginning. The voice acting is absolutely great, the graphics are amazingly good, and the action is even better. Sometimes, I had the feeling that I was playing The Last Of Us Part I, and if you’ve played the game, you know what a masterpiece that is.
One thing’s for sure, though: If you don’t like watching too many cinematics during the campaign, Days Gone is surely not for you. But if you appreciate some good dialogue and watching a story progress slowly unveiled like a TV show, then you’re in luck.
Days Gone has a fairly big map that you’ll be unlocking steadily as you progress through the main storyline, and at some point, you won’t be able to travel back to the main camps until you complete a few important quests.
Speaking of travel, although you have the chance to fast-travel to some of the spots that you cleared out, you’ll mostly find yourself driving with your bike across various forests, mountains, military camps, and abandoned towns, scavenging for supplies and crafting weapons that will help you fight against the Freakers and human enemies.
The game also gives you two choices: You can either go “all-in” and start shooting at everything that’s moving or play it safe and use stealthier tactics to fight each enemy, whether it’s a human or a Freaker.
Skill Points and bike upgrades
Days Gone gives you three main sections with skills that you have to unlock if you want to become stronger and service more easily. You can unlock those skills each time that you earn a Skill Point and basically choose the ones that are the most important for you – or based on your gameplay style.
Skill Points are being unlocked as you complete side and main quests, killing Freakers, clearing out camps, and restoring the power in the National Emergency Response Organization (NERO) spots. When it comes to the latter, you’ll also find boosters (known as NERO Injectors) that you can use to increase either your health, stamina, or focus.
Apart from your character’s skills and stats, you will also have many options when it comes to your bike, which can be upgraded in many different ways. Sure, you can easily customize it by changing its colors and placing some stickers, but the real deal is with its engine.
You can upgrade multiple parts of your bike by visiting any mechanic, including the engine, exhaust, fuel tank, nitro, tires, frame, suspension, storage, and the radiator that helps it stay cool and run more efficiently.
In the beginning, you’d have to survive with a slow bike that constantly needs refueling – and as you drive, any crash will result in repairing your bike using scraps that you scavenging through the map.
You can find many scraps by searching in abandoned cars or by paying the mechanic to refuel and fix your bike every time it needs repairing.
Side and main quests
There are over 150 side and main quests that you can complete in Days Gone, and if you’re rushing through the main story, you’re looking at 30 to 40 hours of gameplay. If not, you’ll end up playing approximately 50 to 60 hours, or even over 65 hours if you want to clear out everything there is.
Once you complete the main story, you can always replay it from the very beginning by starting a New Game Plus (NG+). This is a great feature that was later added to the game, and it gives you the chance to replay everything – but this time, by letting you keep all your unlocked skills, NERO injector upgrades, weapons nd crafted recipes, bike upgrades, and all the encampment trust and credits.
However, if you decide to start an NG+, certain items like your crafting materials and inventory items will be deleted, including Freaker ears, animal meat, whatever you had stored on your bike, etc.
Unfortunately, though, once you complete the NG+, there isn’t much else to do in the game, really. I mean, apart from the standard horde-cleaning (I’ll talk about this in a bit) and all the side missions, the aren’t many post-game activities to take part in, and I do hope Bend Studio and Sony will fix that by adding even more content and features in the remastered version.
Get ready for some Horde Cleaning
Hordes are the best thing about Days Gone: Thousands of Freakers, all moving together in a single, truly terrifying unit. Those massive groups are usually gathered near nests, feeding grounds, or water sources, and fighting a horde is arguably one of the hardest and most intense challenges.
Although cleaning hordes is optional, during the campaign, you’ll have to kill one (which, believe me, is not even a medium-size one) in order to continue with the storyline.
After that, each time that you kill a whole horde, you’ll be rewarded with lots of XP, crafting materials, and in some cases, storyline progression.
Unlike hordes in other games, in Days Gone, it’s all about studying their behavior, locating their movement patterns, and using the environment to your advantage.
For example, setting up traps, using explosives, or even leading the Freaker hordes into bottlenecks is crucial if you want to kill them all. Bringing them to narrow spaces and burning them is another way to clear them out more quickly.
Crafting for survival and the many collectibles
In Days Gone, making sure that you collect any valuable resources and components needed for crafting is essentially the smartest thing you can do. To be able to craft, though, you’d have to first collect everything that you can, and there are many things that you’ll need for crafting different materials.
When it comes to crafting, here’s a list of items that you can craft using the materials that you find:
- Weapons: Spiked bats, axes, and other melee weapons.
- Ammunition: Crossbow bolts, including explosive and incendiary variants.
- Explosives: Molotov cocktails, pipe bombs, and proximity bombs.
- Traps: Attractor bombs and remote bombs.
- Health Items: Bandages, health cocktails, and stamina cocktails.
- Utility Items: Smoke bombs and focus cocktails.
As a beginner, the more items you have, the higher your chances of surviving, especially when it comes to clearing out nests, hordes, and human enemy camps. And because you can’t really collect and store too many items at once as you’re starting out, crafting all the time is important, and having backup supplies for more crafting is also crucial.
The game also features a whole list of collectibles that you can find throughout the whole map, but some of them are not as easy to find as you may have thought:
| Collectible | Information |
|---|---|
| Character Collectibles: | Insights into the characters’ backstories. |
| NERO Intel: | Information about the pandemic and its aftermath. |
| Sarah’s Lab Notes: | Personal notes from Deacon’s wife. |
| Radio Free Oregon Broadcasts: | Conspiracy-laden broadcasts. |
| Colonel Garret’s Speeches: | Ideological rants from a key character. |
| R.I.P. Sermons: | Chilling messages from the Rippers. |
| Tourism Collectibles: | Notes about Oregon’s landmarks. |
| Historical Markers: | Details about the region’s history. |
| Herbology Plants: | Used for crafting. |
| Camp Guitarists: | Musical performances to enjoy. |
| Anarchist Cairns: | Stacked rocks left by anarchists. |
Like I said earlier, if you want all the collectibles on your hands, then you’re looking at around 65 hours of gameplay – or even more, depending on your speed and skills. The conspiracy-laden broadcasts will keep you company while driving with your bike, and it’s fun to see how Deacon, the main character, reacts to them.
Listening to the chilling messages left by Rippers is also fun and interesting, and if you have more time on your hands, listening to the musical performances from guitarists found in camps is a great way to actually feel all the work that Bend Studio and Sony put into creating this masterpiece.
The robust ‘Photo Mode’ in Days Gone
If you’ve read my previous reviews, you know how much I focus on one very specific little feature: The Photo Mode. This is by far one of my favorite tools in any game, and that’s because it gives me more reasons to explore the world, find the best spots, and take some great shots.
Unfortunately, not many games come with a robust and feature-rich Photo Mode, and not close enough with what I’ve seen in Days Gone. Here, you get to change and adjust almost anything that you need to take even greater shots, and if you choose, you can even wait for it to capture the best possible quality.
Here’s a list of the most basic options that you’ll find in Days Gone’s Photo Mode:
- Character Settings: Toggle visibility for Deacon, his bike, or other characters, and change Deacon’s facial expressions, ranging from happy to angry or even winking.
- Camera Controls: Adjust the field of view, focal distance, and aperture for cinematic shots, and use the “Focus Lock” feature to keep a specific point in sharp focus, no matter where you move the camera.
- Filters and Frames: Apply various filters and color grading options to enhance the mood of your shots, and add custom frames, including Days Gone logos and black frame shapes.
- Advanced Settings: Fine-tune your photos with over 50 settings, such as bloom, color grading, and film grain, and save your custom settings as presets for future use (I loved that one).
- Environmental Options: Capture the beauty of the game’s dynamic weather, day-night cycle, and diverse biomes.
As you can see, there are plenty of options that you can use to make your shots look as professional as they go. If you adjust the lighting, find the best angle and composition, and play with the focus and aperture, you’re looking at some really great results.
By the way, every single picture that you see in this review has been taken with Days Gone’s Photo Mode tool by me – enough have a better idea of its abilities.
All the bugs and the performance issues
Playing Days Gone means that you have no problem dealing with all of its bugs, and believe it or not, there are still so many! Most of the time, I’ve seen Freakers stuck and unable to die or move, while other times, they were running in different directions.
Human enemies were unable to see me even when I was in front of them, and sometimes, they just showed up from nowhere – like they had fallen from the sky. In some Ripper camps, I felt like I was invisible and no one could see me, which made the gameplay even easier to complete.
Then there’s this thing with the voice acting, where many times (especially when we’re on the bike), Deacon starts yelling instead of talking. This is frustrating because while the other characters are not talking that loudly, it seems that Deacon just wants to yell. I also didn’t appreciate the fact that many of the dialogs were getting cut whenever I was very close to starting a new mission or quest.
Performance drops are also a thing. I’ve played a lot with the graphics, and at one point, I lowered enough to see each pixel the game had to provide, only to experience the same performance issues as I did when I set my graphics to High or Ultra. It’s just the game, it’s not your GPU, so don’t get frustrated if you’re a PC player.
Although the bugs and performance drops didn’t really make me feel any different about the amazingly crafted story and the environment that Bend Studio has created, they were happening so often that, at one point, it made me wonder if the developers actually played the game.
System Requirements for PC players
| Requirements | Minimum | Recommended |
|---|---|---|
| OS: | Windows 10/11 64-bits | Windows 10/11 64-bits |
| Processor: | Intel Core [email protected] or AMD FX [email protected] | Intel Core [email protected] or Ryzen 5 [email protected] |
| Memory: | 8 GB RAM | 16 GB RAM |
| Graphics: | Nvidia GeForce GTX 780 (3 GB) or AMD Radeon R9 290 (4 GB) | Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 (6 GB) or AMD Radeon RX 580 (8 GB) |
| DirectX: | Version 11 | Version 11 |
| Storage: | 70 GB available space | 70 GB available space |
| Disk: | SSD for storage is recommended | SSD for storage is recommended |
Frequently Asked Questions
If you have more questions about Days Gone, head over to our Forum and start a new topic, or leave your comment at the end of this page.
When will Days Gone Remastered be released?
Based on the official announcement by Sony and Bend Studio, Days Gone Remastered is set to be released on 25 April this year. Unfortunately, the release date only includes the version for the PlayStation 5, while PC players will have to wait longer.
Is there a Co-Op Online Multiplayer?
Unfortunately, there isn’t a Co-Op mode in Days Gone. Players can’t play together, and based on what we know, the remastered version will also not include a multiplayer option.
What will happen if I start the New Game+?
If you start a New Game+ game, all of your story’s progress will be lost, including everything that you had in your inventory. Thankfully, your skills and upgrades will stay untouched, so you can play the whole game from the very beginning, but this time stronger and faster.
How do I keep in-game backups manually?
To keep a new backup, you can either move close to your bike and click on the “R” button on your keyboard (when the icon gets displayed in the bottom left corner of your screen), or by opening the ‘Settings‘ menu and clicking on ‘Save Game‘. You can save multiple games or just one.
How can I increase the game’s performance?
The easiest way to increase the performance and FPS is by lowering the “Render Scale” option found in the game’s settings. Other than that, the “Quality Preset” that switches all the settings is a great way to see which one works better for your hardware. Once in the Graphics settings, you can see GPU usage and FPS in real time from the top right corner of your screen.
Most players I’ve talked to love and appreciate Days Gone, and although most of them are waiting for a sequel, this is the best time for new players to join this dangerous world and for old players to relive each moment once the remastered versions come out.
Have you played the game? If so, what did you like and hate the most about it, and what are you expecting to see if Bend Studio and Sony release Days Gone 2? Do you want a sequel or a prequel? Let me know in the comments section down below.
