Days Gone - Playstation 4

It took me a couple of hours to settle into this game but now I truly love it and can call it one of my all-time favorites! And talk about getting your money's worth! I've been playing for like 3 months and just came as close to finishing as I could. To set the stage, I definitely like a certain type of game. The games I love and play over and over are:1) The Last of Us (My all-time favorite. Joel and Ellie are my people.)2) Uncharted (all of them)3) Tomb Raider: Definitive Edition4) Rise of the Tomb Raider (Very disappointed in Shadow of the Tomb Raider)Games Other Gamers Love But I Ended Up Returning Are:1) Red Dead Redemption II2) Beyond Two Souls3) God of War4) Witcher III5) Anything with the name BIOSHOCK on itI also tend to like linear games more than open world games. So I was fully prepared to be disappointed by DAYS GONE. But man, there is just SO much to do! The storyline ends up being touching, as do Deacon's relationships with Sarah and Boozer. The voice acting is great and even the facial acting is amazing in spots. The shoot-outs with the bad guys are awesome with a variety of weapons and solid mechanics reminiscent of UNCHARTED. The battles with the swarms and especially the hordes are positively chilling. Sometimes just choosing to ride your bike at night when it's most dangerous is positively thrilling. My nerves stayed on edge a LOT while playing this game.They have fixed most of the earlier glitches you'll see mentioned in some of these reviews. It did take me DAYS to figure out how to start the LIGHT A CANDLE mission! (Just go and stand right inside the gate at Lost Lake until you find the right spot.) Every now and then something really funny will happen like a zombie "frozen" in place on the road or from the corner of your eye, you'll see a zombie tumble right out of the sky.One of the coolest things is that once you finish the main storyline, there's still a ton of stuff to do so you don't have that "let-down" you usually feel after a great game ends. When I finished the main storyline, I had only killed 18% of the freaker "hordes" so I spent the next several days hunting them down. Plus the different camps STILL keep radioing you with new missions after you finish the main storyline. Once again, you get your money's worth.Anyway, I've enjoyed every minute I've spend playing the game and now I guess I have to pick up the pieces of my real life and move on. (Got a fright the other night at the tennis courts when the sound coming from the nearby baseball park sounded just like a horde!)I think this game was worth every penny and I'll probably play it again someday. Preferably on the new "New Game Plus" mode where I get to keep all of my skills, credits, and weapons from my first play-through so I can kick some SERIOUS zombie patootie! (Plus skip the cut scenes.) Enjoy!

I pre-ordered this game as soon as I saw it at E3. I played about an hour when it arrived and put it down due to all the bad press I saw it getting. Critics tend to be overly critical about things. You never really see games in the middle, it's either a 10 or a 0 with very little in between. How critics are able to complete games of this size within what I assume is less than a week and portray an accurate picture of the game is beyond me. In fact I'm pretty sure most of them never complete the games in their entirety. And people on here posting 1 star reviews when they haven't barely played it is ridiculous. How can you review a game that can take 60 to 80 hours in a day's worth of playing it and have any informed opinion of it?Thankfully I picked it back up again and played through it over a month. I heard about all the bugs and things people found wrong with it. Frankly I think some people complain just for the sake of complaining. As gamers we have become spoiled. If a game doesn't release on the date it's supposed to we complain, if it does release early to satisfy gamers we complain about the bugs they didn't have time to fix.As a software engineer myself and one that works in quality assurance I see a ton of bugs and almost every day something is broken. It's not because the people at Bend are not good at their job, it's because software development with lot's of employees and tight deadlines causes mistakes. That's just the nature of the business. Too many cooks in the kitchen. But games of this size need large studios to do the work so sometimes you have to overlook the flaws to find the good these people have done.After waiting for a while before starting again, it gave them time to fix bugs. Other than the image freezing every now and then to load things into memory (playing on original PS4 and wasn't a game breaker for me) I never had any other bugs occur. I enjoyed the combat, the motorcycle upgrades, the beautiful graphics, the characters, the realism (no wacky/goofy weapons) and the story was a lot better than some people let on. I wanted a AAA game like State of Decay but actually good. This delivered for me in a market full of crap zombie games.Yes the game loop got repetitive (think Assassin's Creed) but the story kept me engaged. And if you look really hard enough, every game out there has a game loop. That's how they are made. If studios had to craft every element of a game to be a unique style of play that didn't repeat you'd be waiting for a decade for a game to come out.Don't believe all the negativity out there. Try things yourself and form your own opinions. Critics are not always the best source of information as everyone has their own opinions about what they like.

NO SPOILERS: This was a surprise hit for me. It's an open world adventure very much mimicking the FarCry or Assassin's Creed genre. It is post-apocalyptic (my favorite genre) US Pacific Northwest, and I enjoyed it's slightly more plausible plot (are zombies ever plausible) than most zombie games. The world was well thought out and seemed like what might really happen if a virus zombified our world. I particularly enjoyed that you get around on a motorcycle and have to scrounge for fuel. This seemed likely as the motorcycle is versatile, low gas needs, goes off road, easily hidden, etc. The driving mechanics were great, and upgrading your bike (speed, traction, durability, etc.) is fun.You get the typical plot missions and side missions (which build currency, faction trust, and gain items). The game thankfully has minimal junk missions (like Assassins Creed parkour challenges, or FarCry race for time challenges). These always strike me as contrived. Why would I ever stop the mission to chase a piece of paper floating on the wind? So not only did it keep it more real (I know zombies aren't real, but I want the narrative to stay realistic within the defined world), but it also solved my biggest complaint about open world games by having a plot that is a little more intrusive. Not so much that I didn't enjoy exploring or prioritizing missions my way, but enough that I felt the presence of the well-written narrative. And every time things started to get a little old, the story brought a twist with new environments and elements. It kept me engaged all the way to the end.