Days Gone PC: Melting pot of open-world influences makes for one of the more immersive zombie slayers out there

Greetings, traveller, and welcome back to The Register Plays Games, our monthly gaming column. In May, the industry finally pushed some hot properties out the door including Resident Evil Village, Biomutant, and the Mass Effect remasters. But we opted to check out something just a little bit older. Though pop culture might …

[ShadowSystems]

My favorite anti-zombie weapon...

Was a gun that shot spinning circular saw blades like ninja stars on steroids. You didn't need a headshot to kill them, you just needed a torso or hip shot to deprive them of their legs. Once you had reduced them to mere crawling horrors, you could then have fun playing zombie golf. FORE! *Whack* Damn, sand trap... =-)p

[Anonymous Coward]

Average is as average does

I played this on the PlayStation. It's the epitomy of average - if you've played any open world action game you've played this one.

That said. If you don't have that genre fatigue, it's plenty pretty and a decent game. Nobody ever said sufficient was the same as bad.

The real story though is the developers setting out to not want to do a crappy PC port. It sounds like they've, on a technical level, pulled this off? More with that sort of thing!

[Morten Bjoernsvik]

Re: Average is as average does

|I played this on the PlayStation. It's the epitomy of average - if you've played any open world action

|game you've played this one.

And if you buy a $50 500GB SSD and replace the HD in PS4, you reduce the loadtimes. Due to the crappy old controller you can go fine with the cheapest slowest ssd there is and still halve the load times. And it the fan does not run that much.

[NoneSuch]

Re: Average is as average does

On PC, it isn't average, it rocks. The game play on my RTX 3090 is buttery smooth with 150 FPS (I capped it there) at 1440 res on a 32" screen. I played 60 hours so far and am still loving it. Only one CTD in that time . A few glitches that a game reload fixed, but overall a good quality game.

There are a lot of cut scenes. Thankfully, you can skip most of them, but there are a few times where you are forced to "walk and talk" about non-game impacting matters that annoys me. If you are into story then you'll like this game.

Taking on a horde is challenging (as it should be), but I could never get one below half without having to pull out, scrounge for resupply, then return. I'm not a Red Bull infused youth so that may be my age showing, but resupply should be a tad easier. Surprised there's no merchant to buy raw goods.

Best method: Wait until a horde leaves their cave, sneak in and leave remote bombs and scattered gas cans behind then, wait for them to return. Mark the last one to enter with bino's and when he stops moving, detonate the bombs. Satisfying.

When you find the M249, hang onto it.

Well worth $40 on Steam.

[Anonymous Coward]

"If you love a game, buy it at fucking full price."

Seems to me there's an issue with temporal ordering here - how do I know whether I love it until *after* I buy it and play it?

I mean, I want to agree with the sentiment, but how is it supposed to work in practise?

[Spoonsinger]

Re: "If you love a game, buy it at fucking full price."

So if a person, (say), buys games during a Steam sale, but never gets around to playing, (or even downloading them), is that good or bad?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: buys games during a Steam sale, but never ...

Look, I am going to get around to playing the damn things, right? It's just that $REALLY_CONVINCING_EXCUSE.

=

:-)

[Cederic]

Re: "If you love a game, buy it at fucking full price."

Your support for the gaming industry is appreciated :)

My Steam backlog is down to a mere 150 games now. Almost all of those came with bundles though, so my guilt level is: None.

It does though mean that I rarely buy full price games. Sorry but your game just isn't worth £60 on release. Hell, to get the full Total Warhammer you'd need to spend £200+; even buying it all on sale has cost me over £100.

But that's because I've played it for hundreds of hours, so I keep going back and giving them more money. I'm still not buying Total Warhammer 3 for full price.

[DrXym]

Re: "If you love a game, buy it at fucking full price."

I don't think I have *ever* loved a game before buying it. I've certainly been fooled into thinking I might by hype and a few bad experiences mean I wait for review consensus before buying any game now. Maybe I miss a few games that I would like but I'd rather not waste money on those I won't.

As for this particular game, I don't see it being a like/love. Maybe it's okay but I also think that it'll be price slashed before long & possible end up in some kind of bundle or giveaway in a few years. So I'll wait.

[Alan Bourke]

Re: "If you love a game, buy it at fucking full price."

I have, in the days when their were demos. Quake, Thief, Duke 3D, played the shareware\demos of all those and loved them before buying.

[Boothy]

Re: "If you love a game, buy it at fucking full price."

Demos seem to be coming back, at least for some recent Steam games.

I've seen a few recently as just a standalone demo version, but another I saw released a prologue of the game, before the game launch, which was basically the first level of the game. So intro/tutorial parts, plus initial game play etc. Idea being you could continue from the same save, once the full game came out.

[Anonymous Coward]

"If you love a game, buy it at fucking full price."

Sorry, NO!!

With the current prices of GPU's, the games could be free and still nobody could afford to run them.

PC gaming is reverting back to niche (think pre-1999) thanks to the prices and sadly, you might as well buy a console (at least they're in stock).

[Jay 2]

Re: "If you love a game, buy it at fucking full price."

That would depend on which particular console you'd be after. Currently PS5 and latest Xbox are all frolicking with the GPU in an un-obtainable utopia somewhere.

[Anonymous Coward]

Looking for a new open world game - will definitely check this one out.

I can also recommend another not so recent title, Chernobylite. It has small open world maps, good story and some quite funny dialogue (although the main character voice actor for the English version is awful - I'm sticking with original Russian/Ukrainian dialogue plus English subtitles).

Each daily task is in a specific area of the Chernobyl forbidden zone, hence why I say "small" open world maps. Taken together the entire map is a good size though. Like Days Gone, it nods to other games such as S.T.A.L.K.E.R but is a good game in its own right.

[Boothy]

Loved the old S.T.A.L.K.E.R games (would love a re-make, or even just a remaster).

I'd looked at Chernobylite, but it's still down as Early Access, and I've been bitten by EA before so had just ignored it for now. That was back in 2019 though, so might take another look if it's more complete now.

Edit: Just noticed on Steam forums, that Chernobylite is due to exit EA in July, i.e. some time next month.

[John H Woods]

"It ran silky smooth from launch ...

... on my RTX 3070, Ryzen 9 3900X rig"

Yes I should jolly well hope it did! How does it manage on more plebeian hardware? :-D

[Stuart Halliday]

Re: "It ran silky smooth from launch ...

I could barely afford a GTX750Ti. So If it doesn't run on that, tough!

[Pascal Monett]

"Not one of these is a bad game so when you add them all together..."

Terribly sorry, but stringing together the good elements from other games does not always end up in a good game. Just sayin'.

As far as zombie games are concerned, I have to say that 7 Days to Die is my preferred sauce at the moment. They're in Alpha on Steam, but honestly they could go full 1.0 and start talking about patching, because 7DTD is the best Alpha I have ever played on Steam.

[Jellied Eel]

Re: "Not one of these is a bad game so when you add them all together..."

7DtD has been in Alpha since Steam first launched on the ZX81. Which is no bad thing. It even managed to release on the PS4, witness the demise of the porter, get the IP back and may be geting the versions back into line. I do wonder if console porting is a good/bad thing. Old Alphas weren't the best optimised, so console ports may have incentivised that given consoles often have fewer resources to play with.

There's also a fine modding community for 7DtD from simple mods to radical overhauls.

[HappyBarley612]

Awesome Review

Great review! Very informative with light-hearted banter. I watched Richard play some of the game on stream. I would recommend people go follow and watch his content as it is very entertaining